School Construction Updates

We are back from Gorkha. I have so many stories to share with you all. These are some of the pictures of the school construction. Photos by Nick.

workers building classrooms.

an overview of the school area.

amazing women from a remote village from northern Gorkha. Will have their story in the next blog.

feels so AWESOME to stand inside the school building.

meeting the parents that took FOREVER.

the gentleman in the right is our contractor.

Off to Gorkha!

Dear Friends,
We are leaving for Gorkha early morning tomorrow and spend a week at the peace school site. I am excited to see the construction updates and we will upload pictures and updates from Arupokhari.

A journalist from Kantipur is also traveling with us. Our story will be covered in their paper in the coming weeks.

Nick finally recovered from his stomach flu. He is now acclimatized with Nepal's climate. He is excited to go to the village.

We will be recruiting teachers, staff and the students during our stay in Arupokhari.

More updates with pictures in few days time.

Namaste and have a good week!

Guest Blogger: Nick is Here!

Time To Hire!

Kathmandu, Nepal

First, I would like to thank Subhash, Bhuban, and Angilla for extending their warmest welcome to my arrival here in Kathmandu and providing such wonderful hospitality to me thus far.

Miraculously avoiding any effects of jet lag (only an 11 hour time difference between here and home), I have been able to spend my three first days seeing Kathmandu and engaging in some preliminary work for the Peace School and foundation. This includes a variety of tasks from reworking and developing a workable balance sheet to work with estimated incomes and expenses dependant on student enrolment, enrolment fees, and scholarships, to developing methods to document and organize future student information and reports.

However, although these tasks keep me busy here in Kathmandu, I spent the day preparing for a series of interviews that we will be holding via skype and phone with over a dozen selected applicants to our teacher and headmaster job postings. After reading through dozens of cover letters and resumes, I have been able to summarize applicant strengths and weaknesses, and develop specific questions to ask each of the second round applicants. From cover letters and resumes alone, it seems like there will be a lot of tough decisions, as many of the applicants have proven themselves extremely worthy of the positions.  In fact, many of the experiences of the applicants have got us extremely excited for what they will potentially bring to the children and community of Arupokhari.

Riddled with this excitement I need to get back to my work. 

Dhanyabad (Thank you) to all those who have supported the foundation and Peace School, and Happy New Year from Kathmandu!

Nicholas Kang

External Director of Operations & Admissions

Sarswati Peace School

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year: Time for Action

Dear Friends,
On behalf of Sarswati Peace School Family, I would like to extend our warmest greetings and wishes from Nepal. We wish you all a very happy Christmas and the New Year 2011. 


The year 2011 is going to be one of the most important year for us. Our first batch of students will begin their schooling with us. We have come along a long way from running a summer camp in 2009 to starting a school in 2010. 


We are extremely lucky to have friends and supporters all over the world from Tanzania to Switzerland to Belgium to Germany and the list goes on. Our special thank goes to Epic Change (Stacey and Sanjay and all others in the team). They have been so helpful in supporting and encouraging us when were struggling with the project. They are doing phenomenal work in Tanzania and elsewhere. 


Also, our friend and supporter Ania Lichota from UK. She has always been pushing us to move forward with the project and helping us in need. She is an inspiration for thousands of mountain climbers and philanthropists. She did climb Mt. Everest in the summer of 2009. 


We also thank President Clinton and the Clinton Global Initiative for granting us $6,000 for our project. The people at CGI U are wonderful and inspiring. 


And of course Renu Di who is instrumental to our project here. She has been with us in every step of our progress and failures. We will always be indebted to her. 


Jen Lemen is like an angel to us. She is a constant source of inspiration and guidance. We will always be in need for her support. So is Mama Lucy and her team. Christina Ammon from California. Thank you for visiting us and helping us. And in recent months Sabi Gurung has been a part of our project. She has been helping us in range of issues from preparing student profiles to helping us connect with people and org. here in Nepal. Thank you young doctor. 


Nicholas Kang, my friend from St. Olaf will soon be joining us here in Nepal to help us with the project. We sat in our small room at St. Olaf and designed our foundation's website. We fought and disagreed but at the end we both have a common goal of helping to change the lives of some of the neediest children in Nepal. We welcome him to Nepal. 

The lives of some of these children will now change forever for the better. 

Most importantly, its YOU All who are making this happen. Without your generous support and help, we would not have started this project. To continue and move forward with our project, we constantly need your guidance, suggestion and help. 


Please go to our homepage and donate to change the lives of Nepal's future leaders. We also explore you to consider sponsoring some of our students. 


We humbly request you to be part of this movement. Please go to our homepage and look for donate button. 


There are so many people We have to thank. Please forgive us if you are not mentioned here. You will all be part of our life here. 

Thank you all. 
Namaste from Nepal!

Admissions Nightmare!

I definitely anticipated overwhelming number of applicants for our first batch of students at Sarswati Peace School but not like the report I got from the field today. Just yesterday alone more than 80 forms were filled in. More than 200 forms have been filled in the last three days. We only have spot for 250 students  and we are distributing 500 forms at this point. When my good friend Nicholas Kang will be here in the last week of December, we will travel to the village and select the students. I am still trying to figure out ways and means to make parents understand whose children will not be admitted this year. Everyone is hoping to admit their children and for that we need at least double our planned resources and we do not have the resources to do just that. It seems like our 500 forms will be gone in less than a week. I can see some of the parents ready to thrash me in public. I need to polish my conflict resolution and negotiation skills used during purchase of our school land.

A young girl with her brother. She cannot go to school as she has to take care of her brother. The young brother will be sent to school once he is four but the girl has to stay home. We need to change this. 

On the other hand, we are receiving applicants from extremely remote villages within Gorkha district. Just this morning, four parents came from Lapu Village in Northern part of our district that boarders with Tibet. They have to walk for four straight days to reach our village. They want to admit their children and I just cannot say no. I am excited that even in those places they now realize the importance of quality education and what it means to them and to their families.

We hope to provide opportunities to many of children from remotest part of our district and beyond.

Fever, chest infection, and cough and cold have been pulling me down for several days now.

Stay tuned for our Christmas Special Scholarships Campaign.

Epic Thanks

Dear Friends,

HAPPY TWEETSGIVING! what are you grateful for? join us in spreading #EpicThanks across the web & across the world.http://www.EpicThanks.org/

Epic Thanks

www.EpicThanks.org

A global celebration of gratitude and giving that honors inspirational changemakers who created hope in our world.

This is a global effort to help our work here in Nepal and Elsewhere. Please support and donate!


And here is my story via http://epicthanks.org/changemakers

My journey to this day began in Arupokhari, a remote western Nepali village, which is more than a day's walk from the district headquarters. My village was at the heart of Nepal's ten years of civil war from 1996 to 2006. When I was five years old, every day I walked barefoot to and from school and then came home to study under the kerosene lamps as part of my daily routine. Even though we didn't have blacktopped roads, electricity, telephones or a proper school, all the children I knew dreamed of becoming doctors or pilots. We knew even then that no one wanted us to settle for anything less. But over time, as we busied ourselves building dreams amidst poverty, hunger and scarcity, we slowly began to realize how unrealistic and impossible those dreams were. After all these years, we do not have a single doctor or a pilot from my hometown.

Still, with all of this, I have never been able to stop dreaming big. From the time I was young, I longed for changes in Nepal. My audacity to think like this came in part because at the age of nine I had one very important dream come true. I was selected to study in a prestigious British-style school in Kathmandu, Nepal. That was when I saw buses and electricity for the first time; and first started to learn English. That is where I first learned that sometimes in one moment, your life can change forever.

I am a wildly optimistic person willing to sacrifice for my country so that future generations do not have to suffer the same way. I believe that changing a country has to start with educating the young generation and that is where I am investing my energy. With the Sarswati Foundation that I founded in the summer of 2009, I am now working on building the first peace school in Nepal so that the children whose lives were blighted by the war get an opportunity to overcome unfounded prejudice and discrimination and realize the possibilities of creating an informed and tolerant society for future generations. I want all of the children in my village to get the best possible education so that they can achieve their dreams of becoming not only doctors or pilots but anything else they desire to be.

After years of poverty, struggle and despair, I became the first person in generations of my family to graduate from college. My mom passed away when I was nine years old. Her life has been a light and inspiration to me and without her motivation and upbringing, my journey to this day would have been impossible.

Dear Friends, we need countless stories to move our world forward. We need schools that teach our students to action; we need education that not only teaches us to be good citizens but also go out and make a difference. We need idealists; we need dreamers, thinkers and leaders. My education has made me look beyond and contribute towards the greater good of the society. As President Obama once said, "every generation we have an obligation to work on behalf of the next generation."

Some may have called me naive for daring to dream at all, if they had seen the place where I started from. But if we stop dreaming and if we stop believing in ourselves, we are never going to create a world that is fair and just for everyone. If we are not willing to sacrifice, who will? How long can we wait? Please support my peace school project to educate and enable thousands of war affected Nepalese children to dream big and achieve their dreams.

Sarswati Peace School Website Is Up and Running

After months of hard work, our Sarswati Peace School website is up and running. I request you to provide us with constructive feedbacks. Tilak, my friend and web designer is working on uploading the peace school logo which is absent at the moment. We have tons of other information to upload but hope to complete the work ASAP. 

www.sarswati.edu.np

We are one more step closer to fulfilling my long awaited dream of starting this school. 

We will soon upload stories of some of our soon-to-be Sarswati students.