Maiti Nepal Prevention Home

July 20, 2011

Maiti Nepal, Prevention Home

Beautiful life-affirming day.  Visited the Maiti Nepal Prevention Home in Chisapani. 

The Prevention Home is a place where vulnerable girls stay for 6 months and learn vocational skills (such as tailoring, mushroom-farming, candle-making and farming) and then go back to their own villages and teach those skills to other girls.  They also learn how to be activists and educate other village girls on trafficking.  Girls are between 14-22, the age range when girls in rural areas are vulnerable and parents take them out of school to help with domestic work.  After 6 months, girls will go back to their villages, gather others and teach them what they know.  The districts with the most reported trafficking incidents in Nepal are: Sindupalchowk, Nuwakot, and Rasuwa, so I am right in the heart of the problem.  There are 17 groups in Nepal that have benefited from the Prevention Home.  Three of them are in this area and they are the ones we visited on our village trek today. 

At the home I informally met the girls, saw where they live, learn and eat.  I spoke with Mahindra and Ram for some time about their programs, and I showed them my research survey (which has been translated into Nepali).  They were happy with it.  

After Dal Bhat for lunch, the three of us set out for a long walk through the enchanted and mist-covered hills of Sindupalchowk and Nuwakot as we visited rural villages.  One by one we saw the girls who have completed Maiti Nepal’s program and now work in their own tailoring shops.  Along the way I was enchanted by jaw dropping mountains, smiling villagers, rows and rows of cornfields, beautifully laid-out rice fields, romantic mist, and the stunning beauty that is Nepal.  I will never forget this place.  

I am realizing that the deep-core contentment I have been feeling recently is called happiness. I am happy. And at peace.  Here, in this tiny room with big beautiful windows overlooking the misty mountains of Nuwakot.  I am alone, but I am at peace with that.  This morning I got through the entire mantra given to me by Saha Deo Guru. All 108 times.