Back from UK

Since we have been back we decided to finally give in and treat ourselves to a vacuum cleaner. With carpet in all three rooms, sweeping with our short Nepali broom, has never been a skill that we have accomplished well, so last Saturday we went to the supermarket and came home with a small cylinder one that is as efficient as any we have had in UK. Hopefully it will continue to work for the next 9 months.

An expert sweeper

We have had rain most days and every night but as usual Kathmandu has had an easy time and the most I have been affected is picking my way round puddles and cars on my way up to the main road. Sometimes the bus park has been a bit of a quagmire but my bus is usually parked by a convenient dry rock. This of course is very different to life in the south of Nepal, in the Terai where as you may have heard on the news there have been worse floods than any one can remember. This morning's paper shows another 300 families affected by last night's rain.

It was good to be back at work and to be greeted so warmly. Lots to do, including a useful report re the position of school based v community based early childhood centres to consider; planning for some ECD awareness raising on International Literacy Day next month, (more later if we do it), discussions and planning with VSO re extending future involvement in ECD here as well as being part of meetings with the INGOs and Nepali consultants who work in ECD.

Updates and materials gained from colleagues whilst in UK, are proving really useful. Thank you Sheena and Carole. It was certainly worth finding space in our bags for the new Foundation Stage 0-5 documentation from DfES and these along with other international ECD materials, including a particularly useful document from the Philippines, support our thinking as we begin to plan for compiling minimum standards and indicators for children in ECD here ( Any further suggestions for on line materials other than UK, NZ would be really useful, ECERs etc)

Work is not all meetings and office though and I have spent a couple of days visiting ECD provision alongside a Nepali colleague. The second of these days demonstrated the importance of monitoring minimum standards and the huge need for support for provision here. I stood in a very dark, low ceiling, long thin room with 20 grade I children packed onto benches facing a teacher one end and 22 3 and 4 year olds squashed onto benches facing the ECD facilitator at the other. There was hardly room for us even to stand just inside the doorway. The only resource in evidence was a blackboard at each end. No materials to support children's learning. This would be a difficult situation to work in for any one, but made even more difficult for the ECD facilitator, who having recently had training re the use of a developmentally appropriate curriculum with emphasis on children's right to learn through play, has less status and far less pay than the girl at the other end of this small dark room.

But, as the sun shines here in Kathmandu on a Saturday morning, Roshan and I are going out for breakfast and aim to have a fairly lazy day and tomorrow I am off on buses to see more ECD centres with my colleague and back in the office on Monday.

Love to all

Sheila