ChangeFusion Road Trip, Episode 1

Team-building activity in Dang

Over the last month, our new partners at ChangeFusion Nepal have been touring Nepal and running entrepreneurship workshops for youth in rural districts. Their communications officer, Santoshi Rana, sent us a report with a bunch of great pictures, and we're passing her stories on to you.

There is only one road in and out of Kathmandu Valley, and as a result traffic is frequently totally blocked by strikes or other roadblocks. The team's 12 hour journey to Dang was almost canceled because of this. Santoshi writes:

The first day of our road trip and there was news of road blocks and a transport strike-not good! To Go or Not To Go was the biggest question going through our heads. After a call from Luna at 6am which confirmed there was a transport strike, I went back to bed. After a lot of discussion and literally live reporting by Simant (our volunteer) from the streets of Kathmandu, we finally got a go-ahead at around 7am. We were heading to Dang and Bara after all.

The ChangeFusion team was worried about the impact of the roadblocks on attendance for their workshop in Dang, but their fears were quickly assuaged.

Good turnout at the Dang workshop

Around 9:30 am the participants from all areas of Dang started trickling in, giving us hope that the day would indeed go as planned. By around 10:30am we had a room full of participants and we started the session with 24 young people - all aspiring and full of ideas. Luna and Rafael through their motivating talks inspired the participants. The very fact that 24 young people actually made it for the session despite roadblocks opened my eyes to the determination that they had to bring about a change.

Presenting their ideas

Luna teaching by lamplight

The following day, the team traveled to Kalaya, in the district of Bara, for more workshops and to visit one of their fellow from 2009.

Foggy weather greeted us in the morning and we literally had to drive at a snail's pace to Kalaya, Bara district. We reached Kalaya at around 8am, after a quick breakfast we headed to our partner organisation's (Youth Action Nepal) office where the session was to be held. We wanted to make the most of our visit to Kalaya since our previous fellow Ranjit Kanswar also has his Rickshaw Pullers project there. Rafael went ahead with the session with 20 participants while Luna and I met with the Rickshaw Pullers who had been impacted by Ranjit's work.

Hard at work

Presenting ideas

Working together outside

As part of the monitoring, we went and visited the families of the Rickshaw Pullers to find out how else we could better their lives. It was a proud moment for ChangeFusion to witness Ranjit's dreams of getting the Rickshaw Pullers out of the poverty cycle being realised. Based on our visit, ChangeFusion Nepal intends to improve the lives of the families by providing better sanitation facilities (all the four families we visited did not have a toilet or bath room), education (most of the children had left school due to lack of money or good schools) and train the daughter of one of the Rickshaw Pullers so that she can work with us (many of the girls in Terai region where Kalaya is located is still seen as a burden to the family due to existing dowry system).

Great work, Santoshi, Rafael, and Luna! We're impressed by your drive to introduce rural youth to the concept of social entrepreneurship, and hope that you get some really great candidates for your fellowship contest out of this!