just-one strives to actively promote and facilitate educational opportunities for disadvantaged and marginalized children in Nepal by working at a grass-roots level with the children, their families and their communities to implement a range of carefully developed, culturally sensitive, sustainable initiatives.

A lot of inking, without much thinking…

At times, it seems that it’s the very nature of childhood which proves to be one of just-one‘s greatest obstacles in successfully achieving our overall goal of helping the children we work with to work towards creating brighter futures for themselves. Children, being children, tend not to see the bigger picture and, without much life experience to draw upon, generally have little understanding of the long-term consequences of many of the choices they so often make in haste. In that ever-elusive ‘ideal world‘, kids benefit from the genuine guidance and support of a caring network of family and friends who help steer them along the path towards a good life. Sadly, many of the children we work with here in Nepal don’t always have the luxury of such support and an innate innocent trust in their elders often sees them all too easily misled by the pseudo-friends and benefactors who rarely have little other than their own self-interest at heart…

Be it the gang leader’s conniving mentorship of the newly recruited 7 year old street-kid; or the shopkeeper who’d rather employ the inexpensive services of a 11 year old school drop-out; or the wealthy family who’ll proudly speak of how infinitely better their 9 year old servant’s life is since they ‘rescued‘ him or her from an impoverished rural existence; or the brothel owner who’s happily exploiting the 13 year old apprentice pimp with devious promises of future greatness; or any of the countless similar scenarios we face on a daily basis, just-one‘s small team of dedicated local staff often face the frustratingly difficult task of trying to counter any such misinformation with truths that the children themselves are too young to truly understand and, perhaps even more bizarrely, too trusting to believe…

A hasty decision which 13 year old Bijay will hopefully live to regret...

I’m not going to suggest that the approximately 5-inch-square upper-back tattoo pictured above is a good illustration by any means, but perhaps it will serve another purpose here and illustrate the somewhat abstract and obscure point I think I’m trying to make here… Sadly, this is only one of the ten tattoos which 13 year old Bijay has had etched on his arms, legs and back during his year-long ‘pimpternship’ at the Kathmandu brothel which he currently regards as home. Although much of his innocence is already long lost, just-one still recognises the potential he has to be whatever he chooses to be in life. Unfortunately, with almost 24/7 contact and a cruel willingness to encourage his childish longing for adulthood, his current colleagues hold far greater influence over this young boy’s future than we do and are heartlessly exploiting their strangle-like power of youthful kudos in leading him towards a much darker and more uncertain future…

We are, if nothing more, persistently stubborn at just-one and don’t easily give up a fight. Sure, the sad reality of the situation here amidst the chaos of Kathmandu sees us occasionally losing out and failing to help one or other of the children whom we strive to work for, but it’s early days yet in our contact with Bijay and we’re relatively confident that we’ve still got a decent chance of making a positive impact on his future. The impressive transformation we’ve witnessed Surya Limbu (the subject of my previous blog post, who has been drug free for over a month now and is currently trying to decide whether he wants to be a teacher or a DJ… ;o) go through, certainly boosts this confidence, as do the numerous stories (that I’ll make time to share some day soon…) of other children we’ve shared success with to date. Here’s hoping that some day in the not too distant future I’ll also have the pleasure of writing that we’ve managed to get through to Bijay and that he’s safe and well having finally accepted our offer of help… Fingers crossed, eh?

Well, the monsoon downpour that prompted this unplanned entry (always best to try being productive when stuck in the office – even if it is after dark ;o) has subsided at last and leaves me free to splash home through puddled streets outside – a journey which I’ll happily take  momentarily… Just not before expressing my most sincere thanks to every single one of our kind supporters – without whose generous assistance just-one‘s work here in Nepal would, quite simply, not be possible! I’m obviously more than slightly biased but would, nonetheless, contend that such valued support is something which each of our donors (little and large alike) can be rightly proud of. Go on – be proud… and tell a few friends while you’re at it about this small, no-frills organisation you support in Kathmandu who would really appreciate their support too!

Back to a more normal kind of chaos…

May-Day protests here in Kathmandu marked the beginning of a week-long Maoist enforced, country-wide strike which saw an already crippled country slip ever closer to oblivion. Thankfully, the week-long shut-down was considerably more peaceful than expected and was temporarily postponed by the end of the sixth day, allowing life here to return to its usual chaotic state for the time-being at least…

Maoist supporters flood the capital and bring life to a virtual standstill

While the strike certainly proved inconvenient (especially in terms of sky-rocketing food prices and worry that some of the older kids we work with could easily get sucked into the madness), day-to-day operations at just-one continued to the best of our ability. In fact, the third day of the strike saw a boy we had tried helping a couple of years ago come back into contact with us again. Sadly though, this time round 14 year-old Surya Limbu was somewhat worse for wear and was in the early stages of cultivating a very unhealthy liking for benzodiazepines. Surya’s story is scarily typical of so many young kids in Nepal – an abusive alcoholic father drove him to find refuge outside the home and saw him falling in with the wrong crowd. His unstable home environment, coupled a subsequent exploitative ‘friendship’ he was lured into by a regularly visiting European paedophile, clearly left Surya with many memories he felt were best forgotten…

One of the few silver linings of the recent Maoist strike was that the just-one team were left ample time to focus on helping this confused, angry and scared young boy to come to terms with his disturbing past and focus on creating a happier future for himself. Following an initial few hard and stressful days of weaning him off his chemical crutch, we were all pleasantly surprised to witness the emergence of the bright and happy kid that lay under his street-hardened exterior. It’s certainly early days for Surya but we’re quietly confident that we’ve managed to make an important connection with him and will be able to help him realise his full potential and, over the years ahead, assist him towards achieving it.

An end to the curse of unfinished blogs!

Would anyone believe me if I said it’s not from the want of trying that this site remains shamefully scant on the blogging front? No!?! Oh well, you’ll just have to take my word for it… because it’s true – honest! I’ve just had the strangely refreshing experience of purging my drafts folder, which lies as void of words now as Mt. Everest will be of snow given a few more years of rising temperatures! For months now scores of half-finished, nearly-finished and almost-started posts have hung in digital limbo, awaiting my cursed long finger to point towards anyone of them for long enough to grant their published release. All being relatively time-specific messages though, interrupted mid-flow by some random event or another at just-one‘s humble H.Q, there seemed little point in prolonging their collective mill-stone effect on my poor old neck! So, a swift and decisive (completely uncharacteristic of me) Bulk Actions > Move to Trash > Apply has left me sitting with a scarily clean slate and in dire need of starting again… again!!

While I’m sure that much of the varied content will undoubtedly arise again in the future, it still seems like such a waste that these particular posts will now never bask in their rightful glory of cyberspace. Unless, that is, I attempt to redeem them (and, more importantly perhaps, myself ;o) here by posting a brief summary of just a couple of them – maybe along with whatever it was that lead to their eternal postponement, if I can even remember that far back! A somewhat questionable undertaking (which I’m still not quite sure about… who was it who used to say “I’ve started so I’ll finish” on TV years ago?) but I’m hoping that it will at least provide some small insight to some of the random everyday events which fill our waking moments here amidst the chaos of Kathmandu – events that strangely occupy me to the point of not being able to complete their telling… Does that make sense? Or does it just sound like an elaborate excuse? Bear with me a while longer on this one and see if you understand where I’m coming from…

First up for mention is an angry rant I abandoned a while back now about a request we received from a young Nepali widow for assistance with her son’s education. Not that there’s anything remotely unusual about such a request – assisting disadvantaged children to access education is, after all, at the very core of what just-one does. No, it was the circumstances of the mother which were particularly frustrating and left us searching for some semblance of logic in the whole situation. The woman worked at a Danish founded/funded orphanage here in Kathmandu, but her full-time, live-in position didn’t pay enough to allow her to provide properly for her own child’s education… Luckily, the arrival of a local expert in ground-wells took me to our transit home to contemplate the worsening water shortage which we’ve been suffering from this dry season and so averted what would have perhaps been an overly-harsh attack on one of a few ego-driven ‘feel good’ projects that exist here in Nepal – projects which often tend to be more about the self-gratification of their respective founders, rather than engaging in truly beneficial and sustainable work!

A more recent post pertained to a disturbing scenario we were faced with a few weeks back when meeting with the father of an 11 year-old boy we’ve been helping for almost two years now. We had called the father to the office in the hope of getting some assistance with regard to the boys worsening behaviour (the last straw being his unsuccessful attempt to break into our office…), but were left stunned when he suggested that, as long as we could make it look accidental, the best solution might be to kill the child… This was a post that wasn’t necessarily interrupted by anything in particular, but rather saw me rambling endlessly (Rambling? Who? Me?  ;o), trying to reason whether it was the father’s callous attitude towards his son had lead to the boy’s behaviour, or years of experiencing the boy’s behaviour that had brought the father to such a shocking point in their relationship… The more I wrote the more confused and depressed I became by the situation so I simply employed the services of my dangerously long finger! You can rest assured though that the boy in question is still alive and we’re currently focusing on a solution that involves him staying that way!

So, there you have a little taste of what you’ve been missing out on due to my on-going inability to prioritise the regular maintenance of this web-site over at least some of the other work… With the new year of 2067 (according to the Bikram Samvat calendar) being but a few days young here in the country formerly known as the Himalayan Kingdom of Nepal (and soon not to be known as a country at all, if the powers that be can’t settle their eternal power-struggle), I can only hope that my newly-cleaned slate has been sufficiently marked and appropriately felicitates (as a scribe for a local paper here might have put it) this auspicious occasion! In closing then, and in the time-honoured tradition of ‘out with the old, in with the new’ that plagues the thirty-plus new-years marked in various calendars still used across the world today, I hereby lay to rest all those blogs that destiny so cruelly denied!