EmpowerHER: Rights, Protection and Hope

We are almost at the end of the year and it has been a very challenging and rewarding time. With our newly opened child helpline and day care centre, we are getting more and more requests for help. Sadly, we are encountering more cases of child labour - mainly very young children working in hotels and restaurants. Luckily, the mayor and the police are taking the issue seriously now and are assisting us a lot with locating the children and where possible, their families. 

We have about 15 children regularly attending our day care centre and some of them stay overnight. 8 children attend school as well, the rest receive their classes at our centre. They will start their school when they are ready. The helpline covers Province 2 in Nepal so we are being contacted now by business owners and other organisations asking to help the victims of child labour and a number of cases where the children are forced to beg by their parents. Because of the holiday season in Nepal in October and November, there have been more children and their parents begging. We had a number of cases where the mum forced the children to throw themselves onto any vehicles and not let go until people give them money. With the help of the police we managed to assist a few children but the issue is still there and it will take time to find a solution. We are trying to help the mums find jobs but most of them come from very low castes that have been begging for living for hundreds of years. Nevertheless, we are trying to at least help the children attend school and even if only manage to help 10 children or so, it is always something. And hopefully, in the next few years, there will be no more street children in that area. 

Thank you so much for all your support so far. Please continue following our work and support us when you can - thanks to you we have been able to help so many children. 

This rainy season has again been a very destructive one and many people in the Terai region lost their houses and some even their lives. Because of lack of infrastructure during that time it is very difficult to start any new work. But we are doing our best. We have now signed the MOU with the local government in Birgunj and we will be starting our official child helpline shortly. We have applied for the toll free number that children or any member of the public can call us on - these applications take some time and require quite a bit of paperwork from the government. But we think it should be sorted soon. For the time being we are using just a normal local number. 

We are moving to a larger building in the next few days - the government has supplied us with more furniture and equipment. The new home will have capacity for 20 children to stay at night and many more can come during the day and enjoy nutritious food, classes and games. 

The child helpline will cover all districts in the Province so we will be able to help a lot of children that need assistance. The local government want to make Province 2 street children free so they are wonderful at supporting our work. 

We have a fantastic volunteer arriving in Birgunj in a week's time so she will assist the staff and children in decorating the new building and making it as child friendly as possible. The boys also want to help so we can't wait to see more of their artistic efforts on the walls!

We will update with the photos of the new home in our next report.

Thank you so much for all the support so far!