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!

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