Build, Renovate and Furnish Classrooms
"Could you come and look at our school? A couple of hours ago, a big wind ripped the roof off our Early Childhood Center. We will need some help to repair it."
-Phone call from principal of Jalpa School to Nepali VIN/PiSL Coordinator
Over the past nine years, we have worked hard to provide a safe, dry and engaging place for teachers to teach and children to learn. We have renovated 11 classrooms, built four new earthquake resistant classrooms, provided 130 locally-constructed, child-friendly tables, and 48 cubbies/storage cabinets. We have provided simple mats to cover the cold, concrete floors. We have plastered interior walls and painted them white to brighten up the space. Each classroom has a copy of the PiSL Early Childhood Curriculum and the instructional materials needed to implement the activities. Several classrooms have beautiful murals painted by international volunteers from our partner nonprofit organization, VIN. It has been wonderful to watch these Early Childhood Centers grow and mature!
Renovated classroom with mural
The environment in rural Nepal is extremely harsh. In dry season it is unbelievably dusty, and in rainy season, it is incredibly muddy. The classrooms get very dirty and are hard to clean (there is no electricity so vacuums do not work). Constant storms during rainy season can make the rooms and materials damp. A huge windstorm this spring the roof blew off the building that housed the Early Childhood Center. New beams and tin roofing had to be purchased to repair it.
Roof was blown completely off the Jalpa Early Childhood Center
We currently utilize donations to ensure that the 47 existing Early Childhood Centers receive the necessary on-going maintenance and repairs. The 10 Centers that were created in 2013 were first on the list. They also will received a larger storage cabinet as their first one was not large enough. Our VIN Coordinator in Okhaldhunga regularly distributes rugs for the floors in each classroom. Several Centers got a new coat of whitewash inside. A number of VIN volunteers have painted murals in several classrooms. We painted murals in two classrooms in 2018 and two more in Bardia in 2019.
