Nepal: Shanti Sewa Griha
Food for the children in Nepal
Although Shanti Sewa Griha is a social project, the government in Nepal does not help to pay Shanti’s teachers. All costs for salaries, school materials and food for the children have to be covered by the project itself. Shanti needs help to ensure that all the children get something to eat every day and do suffer from hunger. The school calculates with food costs of about 70 cents per day for each external child that comes to school. For children living in Shanti's boarding school, they calculate with 1 euro per child per day.
For the 70 external children (so the children who do not live in the boarding school), that is 14 euros per month per child, or 980 euros for all children. For the 70 boarding school children, that is 30 euros per month per child, or 2,100 euros. Therefore, every month the school needs 3,080 euros for food. For the whole year, that is a total of 36,960 euros.
"We would be heartily grateful for any contribution through your efforts on WOW-Day to finance the food for the children."
About the Project:
About 140 children attend the Shanti School. Many of the children have sick and poor parents, quite a few are orphans and a number of girls have been abandoned by their parents because the parents were too poor to feed the girls. All the children wear the Shanti school uniform, a comfortable suit with comfortable trousers sewn in the old Nepalese tradition. The two kindergarten groups are attended by 20 children each. For some time now, children from the surrounding slums have also been coming to the kindergarten and the school. They live in shabby huts or in very small dark rooms. At Shanti, they get something to eat and something to drink, which everyone is very happy about, as there is a great famine in Nepal.
Shanti Sewa Griha was founded 30 years ago, in 1992, initially as a relief organisation for people suffering from leprosy. However, very quickly other people, not suffering from leprosy, came to Shanti in need of medical care, clothing, food and drinks as well as employment. All those who came were so poor that the founders could not help but open their doors wide and help them. Many of the children who came were also looking for a way to go to school, as schools in Nepal are so expensive that poorer families cannot afford schooling for their children. Since the children of the German founder Marianne Großpietsch went to a Waldorf school in Germany, she also wanted to make it possible for the Nepalese children to experience a happy, carefree and child-friendly school time. That is why she founded the Shanti Kindergarten and Shanti School together with her Nepalese colleagues.
Shanti started with 13 patients and today Shanti Sewa Griha unites a multitude of institutions that do social work for people in Nepal who live on the margins of society: The poor, lepers and people with disabilities, in short: outcasts. Over time, Shanti established the Waldorf School, the kindergarten, a farm, workshops, a clinic, a soup kitchen and even two villages. More than 800 people find shelter, care and a task here.
In the beginning, they built a mud house for the kindergarten and the school with a room for the kindergarten and four school classes. The school building together with a boarding school (also made of mud) was built on the northern edge of Kathmandu Valley, in Budhnilkanta, in the middle of the forest. Unfortunately, in 2015, a big earthquake hit Nepal and the kindergarten, the school and the boarding school were in ruins.
Fortunately, the earthquake happened on a Saturday morning when there was no school, so no children were harmed. To replace the destroyed mud buildings, rooms in the main centre of Shanti in Kathmandu were converted into a kindergarten and classrooms. Now, there are seven classes, plus a boarding school for girls and one for boys. Many people have helped. The centre’s leprous carpenter, for example, built the benches of the classes, and the young people in need of soul care wove the carpets. The tailors in the sheltered workshop sew the school uniforms and satchels made from used canvas. This saves a lot of money.
Shanti has grown into one big family. Everyone shares the grief that the adults had to leave their villages because their relatives are afraid of contracting leprosy, and the abandoned girls and the orphans miss their parents and relatives. The new community is good for them.
Most of all, the Shanti community is happy that there are people in solidarity who help so that they don't have to go hungry and cold, and so that the children can pave the way to a better life by attending school.
Many volunteers from Waldorf schools come to Shanti and help. You are also cordially invited.