Khokana Leprosy Colony

I visited the Khokana Leprosy Colony in which ADRA Nepal has been working for many years. There are many positive initiatives here including income generation as well as continued medical support. There are many children of former leprosy patients that continue to live here as there is no other place to live for them.


These residents could tell some stories. If only I could speak Nepali.


This lady has specially made shoes that help her to walk around.
Even though most of the residents are older, they still do a large amount of work in order to keep their animals.This mill is used to add value to the rice, corn and wheat that are grown here. The product is both used by the residents as well as sold for cash.

Morning Walk

I went for a walk one Sunday morning with Jimmy Carson and Bhaju Ram Shrestha. Here are some of the photos that Jimmy took.

Bhaju Ram and me. The mountains were very clear which is unusual!

It seems that the environmental movement in Nepal is still focusing on the larger issues of climate change than the personal "No Litter" campaigns. Is is a very popular picnic area that obviously doesn't have any rubbish cleanup.



For the Holiest river in Nepal, the Bagmati River is a flowing rubbish dump and open sewer. It would be wonderful if there could be a concerted effort to clean it up. It is fortunate for you that no smell-a-vision as it was gross.

Chitwan Experience

ADRA Nepal had the annual Team Building Workshop at Sauraha, Chitwan, Feb 24-26. We travelled by bus from Kathmandu and arrived at the "Nepal Jungle Resort". There wasn't much jungle around but it seemed that every accommodation had either 'jungle', 'rhino', 'safari' or 'elephant' in their name.
This is Sarita, our housekeeper and cook with the girls.

We had time to go on an 'elephant safari' to the community forest which is a buffer zone to the National Park and doesn't cost as much for entry. Here are some of the views along the way.

It seemed that all of ADRA was on the backs of elephants.


We saw a couple of One horned Rhinos which is what we wanted to see-just amazing!, monkeys, Spotted Deer, a Peacock, a mongoose looking animal, but no garials (freshwater crocs) or tigers or wild elephants!

After lunch we were walking on the road (which had more elephants than motor vehicles) and a young guy asked if we wanted to help bathe his elephant... we raced back to our room and got the girls into their swimmers. They had about half an hour of absolutely amazing fun.

We had five stations at the usual team building activities: spider web, ball rolling, trust drop, stepping stones over a 'river', and blindfold leading.

Before dinner everyone piled into the one bus and travelled about 10 minutes out to the Elephant breeding centre. We got there and there was no elephants... they arrived a little later from their afternoon walk. It was a little bit intimidating. The baby elephants were not supervised and just let out into a crowd of kids and parents trying to take photos. Baby elephants are not that small! Marilyn was 'elephant butted' by a jealous baby elephant that was missing out on some attention. After that we got the girls out of there.

The next morning we were driven further up the river and floated down in a large dugout canoe for about an hour.

That was it and we got back on the bus and headed back to Kathmandu. Here are some pictures of the road. Rather scary as there are no 'overtaking lanes' and so blind corners with trucks coming the other way were the 'norm'. We passed a number of accidents. One of them was of a bus that had plunged over a 50m cliff into the river and 19 people had died three days before. It is no wonder that some have rated the road one of the most dangerous in the world.

We got back to home late but exhilarated from checking off some of the things we wanted to experience while here in Nepal. We will certainly go back and try to get on an extended trip into the park itself... they offer night camping up a pole in the real jungle... that would be cool!