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Hello readers! I know you have read our notes and pleas concerning Rainbow Children’s Home in Pokhara, Nepal. The following is an email that I just received from them concerning some new improvements made possible by donations. Have you ever had a time when you didn’t have your own bed or a table and chairs to eat dinner on?

How are you? I hope this mail will find you all well. We all are fine here in Rainbow Children Home and hope the same to you. We have made all bunk beds for the children. Bunk beds are more comfortable and taking little space in the room so change all old beds and put new bunk beds for all the children beds. Also we have made dining tables for the children. Now onwards children can sit in a chair and put the disc in the dining table and eat comfortably. All the children are so happy to get bunk bed and dining table.

I have attached some photos of the dining table and bunk beds in this same mail, Please have a look and comment, your suggestions and support is always highly appreciated to Rainbow Children Home. Because of your help, support and care inspires to do more for the children welfare. So, I would like to thank you all for your continuous helping, supporting and caring for Rainbow Children Home. We do hope the same in the coming days.

 Looking forward to hearing from you soon.

For more information about Rainbow Children’s Home, their current needs, and how you can help, please email us at craig (at) alsupsworldtravels (dot) com.

  Hey Friends,      

We sincerely hope this post finds you all well and on your way to accomplishing your New Year’s resolutions. We are on our way to accomplishing ours, slowly but surely. Please take a moment to read over this message that we just received concerning the orphanage in which we worked in Nepal during our trip around the world and are now sponsoring a child. If you can help financially, great. If not, at least please pray for this opportunity for the women and children around Pokhara to benefit from this project and improve their living conditions. I assure you, the need is quite evident there. If you want to donate and can’t get it done with the bank info which they provide on their website listed below, please let us know and we can either coach you through setting up an account with a company called “Money to Nepal” or we can give you the link to our paypal account and we will forward the money to Rainbow Children’s Home. Please be a part of this project.   P.S.-RCH is still looking for sponsors for some of the 26 children currently living in the orphanage. Please check out this  http://orphancarenepal.org/help.php link if you are interested in sponsoring one of these amazing children. If you pick one to sponsor, let us know and we may be able to give some insight into the child, as we have met most of them…   

· Educating the children of Rainbow Children Home: The RCH children will have an opportunity to learn about the running of a small business. In the future, after finishing school, our children will be old enough to join the handicraft industry; they will earn money and will be independent and selfsufficient.

Rupees of 1 US Dollar.

    I found myself engrossed in a thought pattern today that is becoming increasingly prevalent during my daily hustle through life: How long will it take people to get sick of all this crap? When will we, as a people, do something decent for another human being as a show of goodwill and common decency, in total absolution from thoughts and feelings of whether we will or will not receive an adequate reward for our troubles? Or will we all get sick of hearing about the poor people in Haiti and other stricken countries and give them and their story the “boot” from our televisions and our news stations in order to substitute in more political banter and self-ingratiating squabbling? Is it going to be soon?

    This week has been a tough one for me, as you may now imagine considering my interminable banter up until this point in this post. If you read my posts titled Help For a Friend  and One Perfect Day , then you perhaps understand that Jen and I have a bit of a soft-heart for those less fortunate than ourselves. Maybe my current work as a children’s crisis therapist and the frustrations that are seemingly inherent in this position are fueling my breakdown…breakthrough tonight. Maybe the fact that the celebrity fundraising drive for Haiti was on television tonight and I doubt that even all of our supposed “role model” celebrities and professional athletes have engaged themselves to send a dime to the relief efforts.

    So anyway, I was in a training meeting today learning to pre-evaluate people for committment into mental hospitals, and the only thing that kept running through my brain was the question of whether or not I am currently being of any service to anyone other than myself and further, if not, why not? Does a lack of current expendable income have to detour my ability to help others less fortunate than I? Am I not capable of love? Of prayer? Of writing a compelling enough argument that people will respond and do something to improve upon the current hopelessness and degredation of this world in which we live? Do you ever consider these things? Alas, I do have a format. The same format that gets politicians the vote of today’s youth (Barrack Obama ). If we, as a people, will embrace a man who speaks in lofty terms about ”change” and “belief”, and seriously expect him to better our home and our world, then will we take that same intitiative and do something ourselves? The same amount of energy that it took for the young people of America and the world to stand up and stand for something that they could believe in equivalent to the energy that it would take to donate, to pray, and to care for and about someone around us. The following list includes several places that touched us in our travels along with several ways to do something for those in Haiti, those affected by Hurricane Katrina, and those in Cambodia affected by the Khmer Rouge:

1.     SON Valley ICF/MR - The Mission of Son Valley is to build and operate a quality Christian Community for adults with Mental Retardation, ministering to their physical, spiritual, mental, vocational, and recreational needs. This was Craig’s workplace for a little over 1 year. There are some amazing people there in need of just a little assistance.
2.     Tuol Sleng Prison Museum - The reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia destroyed everything that Cambodians knew of their lives prior to the takeover. Millions of Cambodians were killed or seriously maimed by their own countrymen only 20-30 years ago. This museum is a monument to the desctruction that humans can cause upon their own people and a good way to help to ensure that this does not occur again ion Cambodia. The museum is housed in a former school (prior to the Khmer Rouge) and torturous prison (during the Khmer Rouge rule). As the government of Cambodia is still coming back from the destruction of the past 30 years and is heavily supported by humanitarian organizations, the museum needs money to keep the place functioning.
3.      Rainbow Children’s Home - This is the orphanage in which we are volunteering during our time in Pokhara. There are 26 children here at present. Some have parents who were killed in recent uprisings. Some lost their parents to illness. Some have parents who were mentally ill and uncable of taking care of them. Some have parents that were useless and sold them into slavery. Basically, they need help. The kids are AMAZING!
4.      Seeing Hands Massage - This program has been setup in Cambodia by the Associationof Blind in Cambodia. It is now spreading to several other countries in the region. During our stay in Siem Reap, Cambodia, we each received a wonderful massage by a blind masseuse. Not only was the massage great, but we were also able to help support someone who would otherwise have probably been on the streets begging. This is an amazing program!
5.     American Red Cross - Provides immediate needs for food, water, temporary shelter, medical services and emotional support to those in crisis throughout our world.
6.    ClintonBushHaitiFund - Two past US presidents finally doing what they were elected for in the first place: helping people. 
7.    Baptist Haiti Mission - One of the places where you could invest your money and be sure to make a lasting difference in both the physical and spiritual lives of those in Haiti.
8.    The Salvation Army - Help for people in emergency situations worldwide. 

    So, I will make the plea again as I have several times on this blog: Please do something to help someone TODAY. We have some amazing friends that helped us throughout our travels and made special things happen for people we met along our way. I just pray that these people and the readers of this blog will step up and make a change today by beginning a continuous movement to effect change in our world, one helping hand or donation at a time.

    The family at our favorite restaurant (The Asian Teahouse) here in Pokhara needs our help! We found the restaurant on our first day here in Pokhara. It is a small, one table restaurant down an alleyway that serves delicious $0.50 meals. The other restaurants on the main strip cost 5 times that amount for the same thing! We’ve come back at least once, sometimes twice, a day for the past 12 days. The reasons we keep coming back are more than just because of the cheap and great food (though it is amazingly cheap and oh…so…delicious). Each time we sit down for a meal, we feel a part of the family. The dad sits and practices his English with us. We discuss life, love, politics, healthcare, family, and a multitude of other things. He even gives us recipes to their best foods! We play with the children as they are always sitting at the table doing homework in the evenings. It’s an amazing find in this place where we know no one and miss our family dearly.

    They are a family of 5: A mom, dad, 2 beautiful little girls, and a 14-year old son. The dad was released from the hospital yesterday to come home and help in the restaurant. During his stay in the hospital, his wife stayed to tend the restaurant alone since it is their only income source. She worked there alone from 5am until 10pm as the family has for a long time. One of the little girls missed her birthday during her dad’s stay in the hospital. Now the family has no money to get her a cake, a TWIX, or anything. The dad, Shiva, seems to have the same ailment that Jen had last year when she had to have surgery on her left ear.  He will have to have surgery on both ears within the next 6 months. Last night he found comfort in knowing that Jen had been through the same thing. He sat at the table with us throughout our dinner and asked questions concerning the surgery that he will have soon (January 13th or 14th), the medications that his doctors prescribed (as we had informed him that Jen worked in healthcare), and about recovery time and when he could return to work at the restaurant. He is attending the teaching hospital here in Pokhara, which, by all accounts is the best around. In order to have the surgery by an experienced ear surgeon, it would cost too much for the family to afford. So, he is putting off the surgery until January at which time he can participate in student final examinations. A student will complete his surgery as part of their final grade for 1/2 price. This is still a massive amount for a family that scrapes by here in Nepal. Jen, having had this surgery, can only imagine (in absolute horror) how scary it must be to know that one can only have a necessary surgery if performed by a student in a third-world country…And that you have to do it twice! Because of this, we feel led to do something to help.

    The good news is that healthcare is relatively inexpensive by Western standards here in Nepal. The surgeries that Shiva has to have will cost around 12,000 rupees. Currently, $1 USD = 75 rupees. This makes the total cost of both surgeries  $160.00 USD. The cost of his hospital stay over the past five days is around 5000 rupees or $67.00 USD. We are on a mission to help with these expenses, if not totally cover them. This family has given us so much already: A taste of home when we really needed it 5 months into our trip, warm conversations on an otherwise cool night, laughter when the children have done funny things, great food at prices that have spared us our usual budget worries while here in Pokhara, and special soup to make Jen feel better when dealing with a bout of the “yuk, I feel awful’s”. So, after all that, here’s what we are asking of you, our friends, family, and faithful readers: Help us, help them. Give this family a Christmas gift that means more than any tube-socks or Polo shirts that we can give one another. We realize that money is tight around Christmas time, but we ask for a small amount to us in the Western world that is a HUGE amount to people here. We would love for you, the reader, to send us the whole amount, but realistically what we ask is $5, $10, or any amount that you see fit. You can rest easy knowing that this Christmas you really did something worthwhile, and this family can have an amazing one knowing that Shiva will be okay. Here’s how to help:

1. Decide that you want to help someone this Christmas.

2. Click on the DONATE Paypal link on the right side of the screen.

3. Enter a donation amount and press “Update Total”.

4. Fill-in your credit or debit-card information and press “Review Donation and Continue”.

5. Follow onscreen instructions from there.

6. Give yourself a pat on the back and go off to do more good deeds this Christmas season.   

     THANK YOU in advance for your time, consideration, and donation. And for being a reader, of course!

    I hope that the uncertainty and hesitation is conveyed appropriately through the title of this post. Why the shaky voice, you ask? We have decided to start asking for assistance to be able to provide for our expenses while helping others and allow us to provide for the needs of the people with whom we will be working. With the significnt downturn of the value of our good old American dollar, we are trying to be sure we can really do this. Maybe we are just crazy and we will find that our funds will last us and be plenty but the closer we get to that day, the more nervous we become.

    So what are we doing to ease our nervousness? Well, we have sent letters to a few churches requesting prayer and support as well as speaking with local businesses. We have placed PAYPAL buttons on this site to try to provide another way to support us. We have prayed. The only thing we haven’t done yet is ask people if they need any odd jobs done around the house…Well, do ya? We have also been telling people that they can sponsor us and get some advertisement at the same time. We will place a picture of you handing us a check on our supporters page if you would like. We will also list your name and level of support on that page. We’ll give a talk when we return or before we leave for you and your friends (church members, coworkers, etc).

    So anyway, back to the hesitation. As most of our close friends and family know, we are typically fairly independent. We hate to ask for help or to even admit that we need it. So I won’t do that anymore in this post. I will ask that you keep checking back on this site to see our “Help Them” page so that you can see where we are working, what they need, and how to get it to them.  Well, breaking down to ask for assistance is tiring, so I must go now.