How Conor Is Spending All His Money: Next Generation Nepal

By Kate | Permalink | 1 comment | February 18th, 2007 | Trackback

If you’re interested in volunteering, social issues and change, you can’t help but be inspired by How Conor Is Spending All His Money. In 2003, Conor took a break from his career (which included work at the EastWest Institute in Prague and Brussels dealing with, among other things, the issue of trafficking) to go on a round-the-world trip, including three months spent volunteering in Nepal with the Little Prince’s Children’s Home. This was where his interest in the area and specifically this issue of trafficking started.

In rural areas of Nepal, child traffickers who prey on the fears (and lack of education) of parents. Knowing the parents worry that the Maoists will take their children to fight in the rebel armies, the traffickers collect money to “relocate” the children to private boarding schools in Kathmandu and then dump the kids – who can be as young as 3 or 4 – in Kathmandu where they are effectively orphans.

Conor created Next Generation Nepal, and NGO which first of all built a shelter to deal with the most pressing issue of homeless kids who had fallen through the cracks of the system, but also works towards reunification and ensuring that the resources are available for local authorities to deal with the roots of the trafficking problem.

Conor’s Bootsnall Blog has regular updates about what’s going on at the shelter. A few of the neatest recent entries include the story of Akash getting glasses and Conor’s trip to the rural town of Humla to link up kids at the NGN shelter with parents who hadn’t seen or heard from them in years.

One interesting excerpt is on: Why does this problem persist? And how do the Maoists fit in?

“DB and I actually met with the Maoist leaders of Humla in Simikot before venturing south – we needed their absolute assurance that we would be given safe passage through the region… the Maoists completely supported our work, they despised the traffickers who essentially stole the children Humla. Under normal circumstances, the traffickers would have been killed long ago by the Maoists, but they are connected at the highest levels of government. To show their support for us, the Maoist district secretary wrote us a letter to carry with us informing all Maoist cadres to offer us protection.”

And finally, while I’m certainly not in rural Nepal, I can understand Conor’s fondness for chocolate: “Turns out there’s a limit to the amount of lentils and rice a man can take before he trades his passport for a Kit-Kat.” I include this to show that the blog is upbeat and funny and inspiring and while it does deal with a serious situation it is anything but depressing.

Read the blog. Send it to your friends and relatives. Donate or volunteer if you can.

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