During this Health Camp several women have been provided with the Norplant, and men and women have agreed on sterilization. The latter requires agreement from both sides and there is plenty of time to think things through, between this first talk, the scheduled second meeting and the actual treatment.
The many women with a Uterus Prolapsed where treated on the spot as much as possible, with medication, a rubber ring to replace everything from inside out or new appointments have been made for operations. There were also children with rare skin diseases, people who fell out of trees while harvesting or cutting wood, babies and small children with worms; all kinds of things passed by this rainy day. From our point of view it was a big success and absolutely necessary to have been there. Meena and Mary Stopes are now providing follow up to the patients, to secure good aftercare.

The Improved Coocking Stoves.
The people of Nepal, including Dhading, cook over an open wood fire inside the hut, 2 or 3 times a day. While cooking, the hut fills up with smoke, with dust and ashes from blowing at the fire. Mother sits next to the fire in the dense smoke, together with her children on the ground and with her baby tied to her back in a cloth. The huts turn black from the smoke from the open fire. Mother and child will inevitably get problems with their eyes and lungs, they almost suffocate. But things have been like this for a hundred years and nobody changed a thing in Dhading. When mother leaves the hut, she locks her child inside, the safest place she can imagine. The child starts crawling, reaches the open fire on the ground and is disfigured and disabled for life.

The wood for the open wood fire comes from the forest, which causes erosion there because wood is being burned and carpented faster than it can grow back. During the monsoon this has another downside; complete hillsides with huts, their inhabitants and the small cattle slide down in a sudden avalanche of mud; burying the living, end of story.

You can not just force something new on a people which goes against their culture. And even if you want to change something in a way which would be better according to us, you have to be very careful, confer with the people and proceed in accordance to locally available energy sources. So people have been cooking on these cooking stoves for hundreds of years, but smart development workers have developed the Improved Cooking Stove, the so-called ICS.
It has almost the same fire, the same cooking corner, only a small wall of clay bricks has been build around it, to which a small smoke channel is attached like a chimney.

This Improved Cooking Stove channels 75% of the smoke to outdoors, saves 40% on firewood and the child is no longer able to crawl into the fire. The advantages are large and the ICS is usually accepted as a good alternative to the traditional open wood fire. The ICS consists of 4 parts; the fire area on top of which the pot is placed; next to that is a cooking hole which contains the stream of hot smoke to keep the cooking pot hot. Attached to that is a chimney of about a meter in height which leaves through the wall. Outside, it has a T piece to provide good suction and to prevent rainwater from coming in.

We have found a professional trainer who taught 5 local handymen how to build the ICS on the spot, at the locals' houses. The material consists of locally available clay and some iron rings to provide the cooking pot a well enclosed body during the cooking process. At an outside test location they build test stoves, both to teach the handymen how to build them and to let the locals get aqcuinted with this new phenomenon, the Improved Cooking Stove.

So far, 115 stoves have been build and there are requests for another 200 at this moment. Once the word gets around... The costs are excactly 3 euro's a piece, of which 2 euro's is financed by us and 1 euro is payed by the villagers.


Daycare centers
An other part of the Dhading project is a daycare center for the smallest children as well as those children whose parents are too poor to send them to school. Every day 50 children attend the center for free education, a cup of tea, regular health checkups and to be able to be just a child and play. This takes them out of the dangers of the hut for the day and mother has her hands free to work and establish an income. This kind of education and (medical) care for poor children costs 40 eurocents per day only.

This last year in Dhading has been a research period into the needs of these villages and communities. Things have been accomplished and many more things are about to happen. Armas Europe is the big sponsor which made this financially possible for us and the Nepalese people.

Jacques Angenot from Belgium has been the driving force behind our Dhading project. He put a lot of his time and energy in supporting Meena and the other Nepalese colleagues high on that mountain, and initialised parts of projects.

Volunteers Annelies van der Nagel, Mirjam Porte, Stephanie Blocklandt, Bas Visser and Jung Hein all contributed by voluntary working at the schools. Anne van der Bosch inventorized the first medical problems. Our graditude goes out to all these people who contributed to the well being of the villagers.





Time for more action
Together with local NOG Sssn, a plan has been made to help these villages progress further in the next 5 years. Better and regular medical care, 5 daycare-health centers for the poorest and small children, improved education at primary schools, clean drinking water in the villages and washing-bathing places where the ladies can enjoy a little more privacy. But plans have also been made for the plantation of truit trees, coffee plants and kitchen gardening on the hill sides surrounding the villages. This is aimed to provide a vitamin rich nutricion and the fruits and coffee will increase the villagers' daily incomes. This gives them a good opportunity to escape poverty. These plantations provide some more vegetation for the hill sides and terraces, which counters the erodation of the area.

The first commitments for financial aid to this project have already been made. Bergen Alkmaar's Lions Club participate in this area's education project, Atos Origin helps out with the construction of a new daycare center and Schredler Financial group sends a group of its people to help constructing.

So it is time for some more action or as Stichting Veldwerk has said from the beginning:
Action speaks louder than words! To be continued.

Rene Veldt, Stichting Veldwerk, Nepal.