Nepal

4 January 2016 Throughout the course of December, we launched a winter appeal to finance the purchase of fleeces and warm hats for the students of the Helambu valley. Winters in Nepal are bitter and harsh. Coupled with the devastation caused by the earthquakes in April 2015 and the total loss of villagers’ belonging, we were worried that students would not be able to make it to school. So our teams worked throughout the Christmas period to distribute warm clothes to the...

MondoChallenge Foundation lands Influencer Award at DSC Social Change Awards ceremony in London We are proud to report that we were presented with the Directory for Social Change’s Influencer Award at a ceremony on 7 December 2015. The award was given for the work of the charity in the three months following the Nepal earthquakes in late April this year. Through our local team, headed by country manager, Jimmy Lama, more than 3000 families received emergency supplies of blankets, tarpaulins, food and...

7 December 2015 Earlier this year, Nepal was struck by a number of large earthquakes, the aftershocks of which are still recurring. The sheer scale of devastation was difficult to comprehend and as you know we’ve been working hard with our team on the ground to respond to the many challenges following the tremors. We started with emergency relief supplies, providing much needed food and basic shelter. Then we turned to the schools, building over 220 temporary learning centres to help...

16 October 2015 During August and September, we took a short pause to reflect on the progress that had been made since the two devastating earthquakes earlier in the year. We spoke to community leaders on the ground, and garnered the thoughts of our fantastic team. They’ve been visiting the villages and, as with all our projects, it is the people on the ground who are the most important in helping us to guide our resources. We’d previously hinted about our talks...

14 August 2015 It has been a little while since our last update, but that doesn’t mean that we haven’t been busy. Having fulfilled our short term aim of completing enough Temporary Learning Centres to accommodate 6,500 pupils, we have been using the pause enforced by the monsoon to consider our next steps. Ideally, we would like the building of permanent classrooms to commence in earnest once the rains slow and the ground firms up. But more on that in a...

30 June 2015 Before giving you our usual update about how funds have been spent over the last few weeks and the giant strides that have been made by our team and local partners, we wanted to set out the text of a dispatch we received from Jimmy Lama, our Country Manager, so you can have a first hand account of the hard work being done on the ground: “It is quarter past 11.00 pm here but our team is still at...

4 June 2015 It has been a busy couple of weeks for MondoChallenge Foundation and our partner organisation, HELP, on the ground in Nepal. This was a chance for the team to consolidate the work they have been doing in the past month, building on successes in providing immediate disaster relief as well as starting to turn towards the next phase of our recovery plan. In terms of relief work, we have continued to distribute shelter kits and solar cells in preparation...

14 May 2015 Many of you will have heard about the major further earthquake that struck Nepal on 12 May, over two weeks after the initial earthquake which devastated the country. We were again in immediate contact with our team on the ground and are relieved to report that they are safe, although they spent the first night in an open camp for fear of further aftershocks. The situation in the villages is unclear, although many people had moved to temporary...

5 May 2015 We have seen an immense amount of progress over the last few days but there is still a huge amount of work to be done. Heartened by the donations, our team in Helambu have broken new ground and reached previously cut-off villages. In doing so, they have been handing out supplies directly funded by our kind donors. Our local team touched based with the Kiul and Helambu Village Development Committees on Thursday (30 April) and returned on Saturday (2...

30 April 2015 It has been a tough few days as news of increasingly desperate circumstances have filtered their way through to the Mondo and HELP teams. Initial reports of villages being totally flattened were verified as the scale of the devastation slowly became clear. In one village, Gunsa, over 50 people have been confirmed dead, at least 15 of those children. In Bhotenamlang there have been around 45 deaths. The list of injured across the valley numbers in the hundreds if not...