Lathom High School helps to raise over £1,100 to help children in Nepal.

Oct 17 2012

Lathom High School helps to raise over £1,100

Lathom High School in partnership with Holland Moor, Trinity and Woodlands Primary schools raised over £1,100 to help children who live in poverty in Nepal.
 
West Lancashire based charity Resolve International raised another one thousand pounds from the De La Rue Charitable Trust. They have already celebrated the success of supporting 350 school children in Nepal . Some of these children were from families which are so poor that they live on wild roots for 3-4 months of the year.

 ‘Based on the success of the fundraising at Skelmersdale schools we were able to secure £8,147 from the British and Foreign School Society’  said Keith Laycock, Chairman of Resolve International

‘We aimed to support one thousand of the most deprived children in Nepal in attending primary school, but our local partners in Nepal negotiated a great deal which allows us to enable three thousand children to access regular schooling.’
 
Many parents in Nepal are too poor to buy the essential items which children need so that they can attend school, so often children stay at home working on the family land, which provides a subsistence level of living for the family. Homes in rural areas often have no electricity, or sanitation and families often walk long distances to collect water.
 
We have recently helped 627 children in the South and Far West of Nepal, in a region called the Terai. In Ruphandhi District we distributed stationery to 407 children at two schools. Case studies revealed that many children were not attending school because of the lack of books and pencils. Mr Chudaman Pokharel, Principal of Shree Kathia Devey School said ‘This campaign gives a positive message to the local society’. The Shree Jana Jyoti School is near Lumbini, the birth place of Buddha.The classrooms only have concrete blackboards on the wall and very few other resources.

Resolve International work in partnership with RUN Nepal who chose which children to help and they deliver the stationery. It took the team twenty four hours to reach a school in Kailali District this week. 220 freed Kamaiya children were given exercise books, pens and pencils. Kamaiya is a system of bonded labour in the Terai started around 100 AD. Families who are too poor to pay rent to their landlord give their children to the landlord as labourers to repay the debt. In 1995 it was revealed that 116,000 people were affected by this system. In 2002 the Government of Nepal made the system illegal and most children were freed.
 
Chairman of resolve International, Keith Laycock said: “We hope that other schools in West Lancashire will join us this year in our campaign to combat child poverty in Nepal. In return schools can access our ‘Life in Nepal’ curriculum based geography teaching resources for primary and secondary schools which are available online.
 
Every year a Nepali child attends school their earning potential increases by 10%.