10-10-2011

For the very first time since we arrived in Kathmandu, we could see the white tops of Himalaya from the balcony. The sight was amazing, and I tried to imagine how it would be standing on one of those tops.
Today we also met our second teacher Anjana for the first time. She had like the kitchen personal, the cook Sumi, the secretary Kaji and some of the global changers been away because of Dasain. The platform was now filled with a lot of people from different countries, which meant that we had to speak English all the time. Very frightening! On the other hand it was nice to experience a livelier global platform.
Anjana started teaching us about street children in Nepal. What chocked me the most was that 60 % of the street children had been physically or sexually abused by policemen. I remembered some children I had seen a couple of days ago. They had been sitting in the garbage and sniffing glue just hundred meters away from the police station. I could not stop wondering if men from that police station were abusing those children. The scenario seemed both absurd and awfully realistic.
Afterwards we saw a movie called “born into a brothel”. In the movie an American photographer teaches children of prostitutes how to take pictures. Despite bureaucracy and social norms the American photographer gets some of the children into a school. In this way the children are given a chance to change their life and not end up in prostitution.
After lunch we started on Future workshop, here we came up with different ideas to how we could make a social change in the places that we are going to be volunteers.
In the evening some of us started to see a Bollywood movie without English subtitles, and all though some of the Nepali Global changers tried to translate, I did not really get the movie.