Catching up

I owe lots of friends (and a cousin, sorry Sue) e-mails so since I'm not going to get them all (any?) done, a couple of posts to the blog. If I owe you a reply just think of this as being a personal mail to you.

It's been a busy couple of weeks at Blue Diamond Society. Two weeks ago we had a 1 day National Seminar on making Nepal a more tolerant and inclusive society (apart from it being the right thing to do, the most realistic way of getting equal rights for sexual minorities is to have a constitution that gives everyone equal rights and bans discrimination on any grounds) concluding with the drafting of a declaration demanding equal rights for everyone. This was followed by a Celebrating Diversity event with cultural activities (singing and dancing) and speeches by politicians and human rights activists responding to the declaration. All good stuff, it just remains to be seen how much notice the political parties take of it in their manifestos for the Constituent Assembly elections in November.

Different dances and costumes reflecting the ethnic diversity within BDS (I've just thought that I should have videoed these for Martin Fitch-Roy to add to his repertoire of dances from around the world – sorry mate, another time):

Speakers looking spellbound :-) . The guy on the right is the Kiwi head of UN human rights here who having only been here a week couldn't have understand a word of the other speeches (as opposed to me who could understand all of 2 or 3 words). He was impressed that we were allowed to have a public rally – his last posting was in Afghanistan where he had to intervene to stop a gay man being executed:

A march down to Maitighar, a traditional gathering place for rallies which is actually a roundabout in the middle of a busy junction, where we had a picnic – swelteringly hot and wreathed in exhaust fumes but an opportunity for more dancing:

Last week was a spreadsheet week as we put together our proposal and budget for next year's (sounds good advance planning until I tell you that this year's funding runs out on 30 Sept) HIV & AIDS programme funded by the UK's Dept of International Development. This funding is managed by the UN Development Programme which, under a new boss, is a completely different organisation to the one last year that we had big fights with over their arbitrary slashing of our budget. This year they are pushing us to be more ambitious and increase our activities so we've planned for centres in new cities and additional services. Let's see whether this new approach by UNDP translates into a friendly and reasoned budget negotiation rather than the dictatorial micro-management style of last year (no, honest I'm not bitter at all). Of course getting the budget approved is only the start, the real hard work is actually setting up the new offices and trying to make sure that they have some basic financial discipline; glad I'm just a back-office boy in all this.

Ok that's enough for this post.

Cheers

Roshan