Election for constituent assembly

  Oh, there are sooo many pictures from the election that I would love to publish! After finishing my work with MS/HURON I work for three months with UNMIN for the Constituent Assembly. I was posted in Humla, on the border to Tibet, and it was absolutely wonderful! 

Everest Base Camp

Coming back to the blog after more than a year I found an unpublished 

draft and decided to finish it even though it feels a bit strange to edit a text I wrote such long time ago. 

To my great joy I had many friends coming to visit me in Nepal. One of them, Meredith, is pure energy personalized, and thus we went on a trek to Everest Base Camp. 

At 5364 m, Everest Base Camp is not permanent. At the time I was there it was inhabited by a Thai expedition waiting for good weather to make a second attempt towards the top.

Although Base Camp is only a tented camp is was vivid with life. There was a computer tent, a party tent playing music from the 70's, tea offered for all visited, campers digging around their tents, and climbers practicing on the ice fall next to the camp. 

In order to acclimatize for the fast ascending trek it is a good idea go high and sleep low, i.e. never to sleep at the highest point of the day. Thus, every day we walked two steps up, and then one step back down again, or simply climbed view points. 

Nice at is was to do this we had bad luck everytime we did climb a view point. We gad splendid weather for most of the trek, but never when we were at a view point.

Whenever me and Mere climb a mountain together we do as mush as we can by our own means. Thus, also this time we carried our bags ourselves. I have to admit though that we packed light, not even near the size of the porters' bags.

Not only do the porter have HEAVY (their bags, or rather baskets, often weigh more than 100 kg) bags, they carry them with the weight on the foreheads. 

I tried to lift one of them once, the one on the last picture, I did not even manage to move it. That rendered many laughs, until I nearly tipped it over. Had I done so they would have had to unpack it to get it up, that's how heavy it was. At that moment, yet again, I was just very happy I wasn't in their shoes, figuratively as well as literally since their shoes are most often nothing but flip flops.

Actually, the porters work under terrible conditions. Those working for a guide company and carrying the stuff for tourist are lucky. For them there are restrictions on how much they are allowed to carry, standard of equipment, hours walking per day etc. But for those working for the lodges it's much worse, and no one controls this, not even the trade union that actually exists for them. I am not proud of taking part of this, as I do just by being a guest at the lodges and eating their food. It always awakens thoughts on responsible trekking and is another reason I want the 

next trek to be not in the most touristic area.  

However, this was a beautiful trek in real good company. It turned out to be my last long trek in Nepal this time but I am certain I will go back for more treks, next time as I said off the beaten track(trek). Probably though, my next trek will be through the forests of Ituri in East DR Congo.

The partnership between MS and Huron is running out and we're performing a partnership evaluation to find out what benefits came of the partnership to Huron itself and to the beneficiaries and the community. As a first step of this, we are visiting some of our LHRAs, and selected beneficiaries of them, discussing what we have done during the last three years, what they have participated in and what they think of this. We are also asking questions to the LHRAs themselves about their training, what they think of the support they have gotten from Huron, and what they want to do as LHRA in the future partnership, if any. I still don't know what they have written, but I sincerely hope they are honest and also write complaints or things they are less happy with so that we can

do something about this. Unfortunately I think they have to much

respect for the authority of Huron and its executive committee so I am afraid they are saying that everything is perfect and that they cannot ask for more. I know this is a lie, they tell me what they think and what they want, but they don't dare to tell Huron. This is something I hope I will have some affect on during my time here; I want them to start questioning the authority and knowing that they are just as good and important as the president, it's just a different title.

During the actual field visits, the language makes it a bit hard for me to be overly active why I spend my time observing to give advice afterwards on what I thought of the programme. Plus I act as the photographer, trying to capture everything and everyone with my camera, a very popular tool. Apart from documenting, I also designed the questionnaires, I was a major part of planning the visits, plus I was the driver, in other words, I am acting behind the scenes I suppose.
Anyway, time to let the pictures talk...

Apparently not only the high way was swept away by the floods. I appreciate that they think highly of my driving, but sometimes I just have to say that even with four wheel drive I cannot get through that... Many disappointed looks when I said that 'I guess we're walking from here...'

How I wish I was a real photographer...

But if I was one, I suppose I should start to treat my camera better.
Usually they line up for picture taking, but sometimes you have to get their attention...

Turning back to Butwal after realising that it will take days before a diversion is opened, and years before the bridge is repaired, we acted as school bus. We did not know how we were going to get to Ktm which was our final destination , and we needed to be cheered up a bit. Helping someone to their destination, saving them hours of walking is an easy way to reach that aim, espacially if they are children, singing all the way!

Vad är det du gör egentligen, jag har inte riktigt fattat det...

För ett par veckor sedan var jag hemma i Sverige och träffade massor med släkt och vänner. Det var härligt att möte så många, att få prata svenska och att se vad som har hänt med alla där hemma. Av många jag pratade med fick jag frågan, ”vad är det du gär egentligen, jag har inte riktigt förståt.” Så, antingen är jag dålig på att förklara vad det är jag gör, och att hålla kontakten med folk, eller så är det ingen som läser min blogg. Förvisso skriver jag mer om kulturella upplevelser, semestrar och mitt liv här nere. Men många gånger är det ju det som är mitt arbete. Och en del har jag väl ändå skrivit om mitt jobb.

Så, vad är det då jag gör egentligen, förutom att dricka te, försöka lära mig Nepali och ta del i den nepalesiska kulturen?

Det enkla, korta svaret, är att jag är en rådgivare åt en människorättighetesorganisation, Huron, Human Rights Organisation of Nepal. Men hur mycket klokare gör det er? Hur som helst så är det det jag är, jag är en human rights capacity builder för en lokal organisation som arbetar med mänskliga rättigheter. Rent praktiskt så ska bygga upp kapaciteten av Huron genom att hjälpa dem med planering, bugetering, implementering, utvärdering och rapportering av deras program. Jag ska hjälpa dem att bli mer effektiva, lära dem hur man håller möten, skriver rapporter och proposals, och så förstås delta i deras program.

Huron i Nepalgunj har som huvudprogram utbildning av volontärer, Local Human Rights Activists. Vi kallar dem kort och gott LHRAs. Detta har pågått i snart tre år, tre grupper om ca 30 st per gång har deltagit i våra kurser. Jag var med vid den sista kursen och höll i en del av utbildningen. Efteråt besöker vi våra LHRA i deras landsbyar där vi tillsammans med dem anordnar program där vi upplyser befolkningen om deras rättigheter. Vi besöker skolor och kvinnogrupper, vi sätter oss bland männen på det lokala te-stället eller vi möter dem vid ett tempel. Vi åker runt och hälsar på våra LHRA, och passar på att prata med deras grannar.
Andra delar av vårat program är att vi deltar i eller anordnar demonstrationer, rallies, vi går till stormöten med politiska partier för att monitorera situationen, vi monitorerar situationer där det har hänt något så som en banda eller att någon blivit angripen av någon av alla de rebellfraktioner som nu finns, och vi håller egna möten. I allt detta tar jag så mycket del som jag kan, jag håller tal på Nepali som någon översätter till förståelig Nepali, jag hjälper till i förberedelserna, och jag är den som kör. Men mest av allt lyssnar jag, iakttar och utvärderar, kommer med råd hur det kan göras annorlunda, och svarar på frågan om jag är gift medan jag dricker rikligt med sött te ur pyttesmå glas.

Getting anywhere is sometimes a struggle in this country. For a start there are often bandhas (strikes) or chakka jams (road blocks). Secondly, each year during the monsoon, the roads are destroyed by the rain. Nepal is extremely porous, and either the mountain sides come sliding down on the road, or the foundation of the roads gets washed away under it. Or, as happened a few days ago on the east-west high way, the only major road through Nepal, bridges get washed away by the powerful flooded rivers. To the left is the beginning of a landslide. We arrived here around four in the afternoon and quickly decided that it would be too dangerous to continue. A few hours later, it looked like this...

So, we could not go that way! The next day we tried going the other way, we'd been told that the road was cleared from landslides and open. As it turns out, it was very open, in fact it was missing. A bridge had simply been flushed away, leaving a ten meter hole in the road... The photos speak quite good for themselves I think. They are trying to build diversions, and until it is possible to drive around, people are crossing on foot to find a bus on the other side. When we first came to this site, we understood before we knew what had happened that this was not something that would be cleared quickly. Usually the Nepalis are very good at waiting, just sitting around doing nothing. But this time, buses were turning around, and people started walking immediately. This is how we realised that something big had happened. Still, we couldn't believe our eyes when we saw the hole. This explained the lines of trucks that we had past the last many kilometers...

Maybe a coincidence, anyway quite ironic, is this sign just some 50 meters from the former bridge. This is the district of Kapilbastu welcoming all drivers into their district, wishing them a safe and happy journey. Or, as they say it here, happy your journey!

A hole in the floor

In my new apartment, I have an Asian toilet, i.e. a hole in the floor. This confuses many people, how does it work, what does it look like, and is it a water toilet? It is a water toilet, basically what it is, is a toilet that has been lowered into the floor instead of having a seat. However, it is an actual toilet with room to put your feet on each side. And, it flushes just as a normal toilet.

Maybe it is a strange thing to put a picture on a toilet on your blog, but I hope this will clear up some confusion for some of you. This is what an Asian toilet looks like, if it is in a home of an expatriate at least. In an Asian home there would never be any toilet paper next to it, and most probably no plants. However, there would be some plastic flip flops because usually the flushing breaks down and the toilet is flushed by pouring water in it, or all over it. And, it is, I would say, also much cleaner than a toilet in a Nepali home.

Anyway, this is what it looks like; it is not an old fashioned outhouse as many see before them when I say I have a hole in the floor. The only thing you cannot do on this that you can do on a normal toilet is to sit on it, and I wouldn't recommend reading while on the toilet...

Rallies and wall painting pictures

Exposure visit to New Delhi

In the end of July I and half of the executive committee of Huron went to New Delhi on an exposure visit. In Delhi we had arranged to meet with Indian Human Rights organisations to learn from them, exchange ideas and experiences, to build a network with like minded organisations, and to get new ideas on what to do and how to do it. We went to several oranisations, the first of them the Indian National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) who stronly urged us to push for the recreation of the Nepal NHRC. The Nepal NHRC has not been allowed to work the last couple of year since they it was not regarded to be as independent from the goverment/king as a National Human Rights Commission is supposed to be. A new commissioner has resentely been apointed but the commission has not started working yet.

Arriving in Delhi none of us knew the address to the guest house were we had planned to stay, and we had to start with finding an hotel why we ended up in the main bazar with the back pakkers. Realising that it takes at least an hour to drive anywhere we hired a car and driver to get us to our appointements. Luckily I had arranged only two meetings a day, with several hours in between which gave us almost enough time. Even after a year in Nepal getting used to everyone arriving late and nothing starting on time, I still wanted to arrive on time to our appiontments and I hurried my colleagues all the time, at times even making them skip their compulsery snacks.

Apart from the NHRC, we went to several NGOs, among others SAHR, South Asians for Human Rights. The chairman of this organisation is the former Prime Minister of India, and after some misunderstandings regarding when our appoinment was, we visited him in his residence. We left all the organisations with lots of notes and ideas as well as many new books for our mini library.

The members of Huron's executive committee are mostly men in their forties, taking care of me as if I'm their daughter. The first night in Delhi I went to the bazar on my own to use the Internet, only to find my colleagues looking for me being worried. "This is not Nepal, it is more dangerous here and you have to let us know where you are"... I had, but Nepalis are sometimes not that good at passing the message on. I had to leave earlier for Nepalgunj as I did not have time to visit Taj Mahal on the way home. After a lot of convincing I was allowed to travel alone, they first wanted to send someone with me. However, they did not let me take the night train as we did coming since that meant having to change to the bus on my own. In stead they put me on a direct bus, all of them coming with me to the bus park and putting me on the bus. "This is your seat, we have put your luggage hear. Your stopping to eat dinner after a couple of hours and remember not to take any food from strangers!" They did not need to worry, my two bus drivers (since it was a 16 hours over night bus I was happy they were driving and sleeping in shifts), took good care of me giving me a pillow, providing food and tea and letting me know when we stopped long enough to go to the toilet. I made it home safely, and left for Kathmandu and then Sweden the next day. At the time of writing I'm at home, having just been swimming in the lake before enjoying a dinner of freshly picked chantarells!!

Human Rights massage

The level of English in my organisation is very low and even though my programme coordination thinks of himself as being fluent (I still struggle to understand him sometimes, especially his written English) he has some mistakes that he keeps doing. for example spelling message with an a in our programme/budget. I still haven't been able to try the massage so I cannot say whether it's better then the traditional Japanese one I get in Kathmandu...

Our main programme in Huron is awareness raising of human rights in the villages around Nepalgunj. By educating LHRAs (there is a post further down on their training) and sending them home to their villages with the responsibility to spread their knowledge we aim to make everyone aware of the rights they have according to international standard. In my opinion we focus a bit too much on international standard, but we have to start somewhere. And even though our education focuses a lot on the UN covenants, conventions and other instruments, it is the basic rights we talk about when we get out in the villages. The right to housing, to food, work and education and the prohibition of child labour, the right to marriage and family, to birth and marriage certificates etc are rights that we often talk about and discuss.

The major problem in the villages is the poverty and the hard work they have to perform to get any food, the majority of the people are small farmers producing their own food, but even so people are interested in just listening to information about human rights and even though they of course would like to get financial support from us they are always grateful for our programmes.

We have different ways of spreading the human rights message, for example we make posters, we gather people for interaction programmes in the villages, we visit the schools, we perform rallies through town carrying banners with human rights messages, and we have painted slogans on walls. On the picture to the right, the former Prime Minster of India is looking at a poster we have published together with a few other organisations in Nepalgunj. The organisations have formed a network called Peace Alliance and the poster is part of the programme we're performing in relation to the upcoming elections to the Constituent Assembly. We met the former Prime Minister during an exposure visit to India which I will write about very soon.

The wall paintings we did have been very popular. On ten different places across the district we painted a human rights slogan on the wall for everyone to see. Since it is impossible to do anything in Nepal without drawing a crowd, everyone is curious, we always know that a lot of people at least hear or see our message. If they understand it, or if it changes anything is of course harder to know why we are planning some kind of evaluation, how we don't know yet. The wall painting was in Nepali, and in half of the places Awadi, a local language that is a mixture of Hindi and Nepali. The message, roughly translated, is: Human rights for all. Peace for ever. Own constitution, own writing.