My lesson for today: The interest in doing community resilience-building work among organizations in Nepal is great.
Today I spent time meeting with various people working in the field of child protection and community development. Some of them have quite a bit of experience with psychosocial work, and some very little. But what was they all seemed to share, each in their own ways, was the recognition that communities in Nepal stood a lot to gain from resilience-building work, and the interest in collaborating towards making that happen.
Some of the most interssting conversations that I had were with people working for Childreach Nepal, an organization that does work in the field of children’s rights. They said that one of the most important issues in terms of supporting children was strengthening the resilience of teachers. Because teachers are one of the most important sources of support for children in the communities they work with, helping teachers to maintain their own wellbeing is an important step to insuring the wellbeing of children.
A number of Childreach’s staff were at our earlier trainings. I had some interesting discussions with them today about how we can optimize the help that Second Response brings to the communities they serve. Over the course of these discussions, it became more and more clear to me how rich the possibilities for collaboration with groups such as Childreach are.