When we arrived in Maandra we were slightly late for the scheduled time, the walk having been harder on our erstwhile volunteers than expected. However this didn't raise an issue as the Mother's Group were extremely busy dealing with their membership accounts and repayment schedules. In the intervening time Rohan donated the crayons, modelling putty, notebooks and pens he'd brought...and we had a regression session with the little ones while their teacher was....somewhere! The day before Rohan and I had visited Greeha Laxmi, the Village Development Committee Health Assistant who'd set up the meeting. She herself and another local lady were also trialling the Mooncups...so technically I guess that's 4 villages now! The VDC Health Post however, was rubble, in the process of being rebuilt. So it'll be a while before we can run a Mooncup distribution there! We were accompanied by another Nepalli NGO worker, who was implementing a program by Plan International to increase sanitation capacity at all VDC health posts. I've never met some one so happy for company on a short walk...he'd been travelling non-stop for many weeks and dealing with reconstruction issues that frankly I'm unendingly happy that we don't have to deal with at NERF.
When they arrived the Mother's Group was open, friendly and amused that I insisted on hustling the men away from the meeting. I led the men away, providing sheets explaining the Mooncups and had some discussions in broken Nepangrezi, (Nepali-English) about the program. When I returned to Yogina's session the women were so relaxed, (including one elderly lady having a snooze) they even consented to me filming some of the demonstrations and taking some short clips of the new 'Mooncuppers'.
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