Who are we?

Hello to home! It's been a year since we updated you last, but it's not our fault! Both of us have had some great projects coming up at work: At Cathy's work they've celebrated 3 years of SAATH's shop Danfe and welcomed the new beneficiaries for which Cathy's been preparing sone math classes. At SCLC, a lot of maintenance is going on to prepare the farm for summer: we've made new bottleways, building a new washing place and a new cow-shed. At the moment we have a lot of visitors and interns from College coming to learn about social work, when I'm showing them around, listening to their discussions or planning projects with them, I'm learning a great deal about the importance, approaches and difficulties of Social work today. Of course, we're doing more and more exploring as well: together we went to Nagarkot for a dayhike where we saw a beautiful sunrise, Cathy went to visit friends in Sindhuli, Tilly has been looking around the monasteries and Hattiban forests in her village. Kathmandu is becoming more and more familiar to us as well, very slowly we're making our way around and are slowly able to understand more about Hindu and Buddhist culture everyday. Having had the time to accustom to the "Nepali ways" that might seem very funny in the beginning, we're both now shopping at the market, taking local buses and making friends with Nepali grandmas.  One of our favourite moments from last month was definetly Christmas Eve, we've celebrated it with two of our Nepali friends, a Finish girl who's volunteering and a Dutch traveller. We had dinner in Thamel and spend a great night wandering around the busy streets where both foreigners and Nepali people were wishing each other a merry Christmas. Cathy spent Christmas day with friends , cooking and Tilly with the family of a friend from her work in the Garden of dreams.Needless to say: special celebration Momos were involved. All in all, NYE and Christmas were very different than at home, but we can gladly  say that it was nonetheless a day to spent with friends that kept us busy so we didn't miss our families too much, still we were both a little extra happy that we could see them on a videocall, and lucky too because we called them right before a powercut. At the moment, we're crossing of one more destination of our list: Chitwan. We will just tell you one thing which is, of course, #visitnepal2020. We're also really looking forward to seeing the projects of the NGO alongside Julie next month.  Namaste, Tilly and Cathy

Nepal is a fascinating country, where meet many ethnic groups and cultures, tradition and modernity, the crowd of the city and the calm of the remote villages, the highest mountains of the world and a dense and wild jungle. The exhibition "Nepal, country of contrasts" from the ONGD-FNEL brings together images taken by Marc Hammer and will make you travel to the heart of this country and its multiple facets, to better understand it. The opening will take place on Friday January 31 at 7 p.m. in the Am Gronn space (12 rue Munster in Luxembourg) and you can discover the exhibition until February 14. During the weekend, we will also offer you a screen printing workshop and retransmissions of the film "Rajani", the inspiring testimony of a young Nepalese girl born in the high mountains and separated very young from her family. Price - Free Contact information:  Phone: 26480441 E-mail: Internet: https://www.ongd-fnel.lu Organiser: ONGD-FNEL

Famill Theisen-Schramer vun Ueschdref huet am Kader vun hirem “AMAZING YEAR” Sue gesammelt. Op verschidden Eventer während dem Joer 2019 koumen esou 1000 € zesummen. Als aktiv Memberen vun der FNEL hu mir een DON un ongd-fnel gemaach. Mat deene Suen ënnerstëtze mer gären Alphabetisatioun vu Kanner am Nepal.

Hello from Pharping, a village about one hour from Kathmandu. Here, I have been working for one month in the "Sikharapur Community Learning Centre", more specifically on their model farm called "Bottlehouse".

Namaste, ech sinn Cathy an ech wunnen lo säit gutt engem Mount zu Lalitpur, enger Stad direkt niewent Kathmandu.Bis elo gefält et mir richteg gutt hei an hunn schon vill nei Leit kennen geléiert.

 

In November 2019 we invited Tsewang Norbu Lama, director of Umbrella Organization Nepal (UON) and Rajani Gurung, former beneficiary of the association, in Luxembourg for two weeks to participate in meeting and exchange workshops with young people in Luxembourg, as part of an education for sustainable development (ESD) project.    ESD in Luxembourg has been a focus of our organization since 2016, after a first round of schools visits and the development of our Nepal-Koffer (a set of materials and games that are designed to present Nepal) and the film Tara.   As a support for our workshops in the schools this year, we partnered up with UON and Marc Hammer, a Luxembourguish film maker, to film “Rajani”, a movie talking about the inspiring journey of Rajani. Born in a remote village in Nepal, Rajani was separated from her family at a very young age and went through difficult times before being taken under Umbrella's wing. Now 20, she continues her studies in social work to help other girls in return.   Over the two ESD weeks, we visited 9 schools, primary and secondary, we visited scout groups and we met friends and supporters of the ONGD-FNEL on the Charity Dinner or for the Lunchbreak organized by the “Cercle des ONG” regarding responsible volunteering. In total, around 400 students and scouts participated in our activities, most of the time in groups smaller than 15 which allowed us to have an interesting question and answers round.   We typically started by greeting the students, with a tikka and a scarf, to directly introduce them to Nepali culture. Then we briefly introduced everyone, our work and the story behind the Umbrella Organisation Nepal project. After this, we used the movie "Rajani" as visual support to launch the discussion. “Rajani” touches on many different aspects of Nepal : the way of life, the everyday activities but also the everyday hardships of the locals, evidently, the film also describes the struggles of any young girl growing up in Nepal today. With all this input that seems so far from what we know from here, questions quickly came streaming in. Especially the younger pupils were often very surprised about how much life in Nepal differs for our daily life. Questions ranged from the food, transportation and behavior of the monkeys to child marriage and the reason UON does the work they do. Even if sometimes, classes were quieter, they seemed nonetheless very interested, thus we got positive feedback, which of course, encourages us to further look into the way we can raise awareness in Luxembourg.   There are so many different aspects of Nepal, and most of the times, the time we had was not nearly enough to properly answer the questions, many teachers asked us for additional material (for example the Nepal Koffer or the pedagogical dossier we prepared), which made us very happy. All in all, it was an intense two weeks, though all participants would agree that it was very much worth the effort, because we not only took an important step in raising awareness about sustainable development but also have we exchanged many ideas. Rajani and Tsewang said themselves that they too learned a lot from the way our schools work and our approach to education as well.