Free Eye Tests and Womens Health Check-ups at KTS for the upcoming World Fair Trade Day

For the upcoming World Fair Trade Day, Kumbeshwar Technical School promoted a Free Eye and Womens Health Check up and Treatment Program last Saturday on their premises.  The program was advertised within the local area, with 283 people participating on the day - including students, staff, produers and members of the local community in Kumbeshwar, Patan.

During the eye check ups, eighteen people were found to have cataracts, one of the cataract patient was a 100 years old man Mr Ratna Bahadur Khadgi. The program was conducted in association with Nepal Eye Hospital, who provided skilled doctors to carry out the check ups. Kumbeshwar Trading Centre supported the provision of medicine and the program logistics.  The cataract surgeries for these 18 patients will be performed in Nepal Eye Hospital who has given special discount for the operation, with the rest of the operation costs sponsored by Kumbeshwar Trading Centre on 12th May. 

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Though I was not able to visit and help out on Saturday because of other commitments, I wanted to blog about this, as it shows how KTS and the wonderful Khadgi family that founded and run the organisation, consistently tries to assist their producers and people in their local area, in practical and useful ways. As one of the founding members of the Nepal Fair Trade Group, KTS is a great example of a producer group run by Nepali's, helping Nepali's and with motivation to constantly improve and try new ideas, not only in their technical work, but also with their local social work.  I am really lucky to be working with them!

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Production getting started! - Hand dyeing the Banana Yarn

So our next production is just getting started slowly but surely in Nepal!!  The whole process takes time; once orders are finalised, the Banana Yarn has to be hand-dyed and dried, before distributing to the women handknitters at Kumbeshwar Technical School (KTS).  Once the knit pieces are finished, then they are delivered to the leather factory (along with all other components and materials) to start the bag production for all the leather goods....

For this AURA QUE production, I will be documenting and describing the whole process as it happens whilst I am currently in Nepal....so for now, we are starting with the dyeing of the Banana Yarn:

The Banana Yarn is supplied in washed natural colour, having been boiled and hand spun from the raw material - the pruned outer layers of the Banana Tree after the fruit harvest in rural Nepal.  This natural yarn is supplied in mass to KTS from their trusted supplier. I am hoping to visit the farmers and producers outside Kathmandu that make this yarn from the raw material, over the next few months, dependent on the next crop season - fingers crossed!

Each lot of natural banana yarn is firstly washed and prepped for dyeing and then dyed the following day in larger copper pots, all on site at KTS.  As I wanted the banana yarn to be a tonal match to the buffalo leather that I am using for the bags, the women dyers firstly try a recipe of different azo-free dyes on a yarn sample.  It is a trial and error process, though all previous dyed colours are catalogued with their dye colour 'recipes' which can also be helpful to find a suitable shade.  When they are happy with the sample colour, a larger sample will be dyed with the same 'recipe'.

A challenge with the natural banana yarn is that sometimes different lots of the same yarn, when dyed with the same dye recipe, come out slightly different tones - which is frustrating when you are trying to match to a sample or leather colour! Therefore I have spent much time in the last two weeks going back and forth to the dye area to check on the process, waiting for the yarn to dry to check before the next lot is dyed (only 1 lot = 10 kg can be dyed in one pot in one day).  There would be even more diversity in colour matching with natural dyes, so to maximise efficiency and minimise wastage, we have to stick to azo-free dyes for now....

For example - see the picture below showing three bundles of the Grey banana yarn for our A/W 2011 collection - if you look closely you can see there is a slight shade difference between each bundle, despite using the same yarn fibre, dye recipe and process!  Its a mystery to me!! Luckily all are similar enough to use for our production in seperate pieces.

Once the yarn lot has been dyed, it is then dried for several days, outside but away from direct sunlight.  Then the yarn is wound into balls ready for the hand-knitters to take home.

So now our banana yarn is nearly finished in our four colours: Black, Grey, Stone Brown and Cream.....almost ready for our AURA QUE bag panels, scarves and accessories to be hand-knitted by KTS' skilled women, who will be collecting the yarn and the patterns from the workshop to then continue knitting the pieces from the comfort of their own home, around the Kathmandu Valley over the next few weeks!

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Maoist Strike cripples transport links, causing Nepal to stand still for nearly a week

So we got to the Nepali/Indian border on Tuesday, filled with optimism that the strike that started last Sunday, would be over by then. But no; at the border, all shops were closed, all cafes, all buses stopped, with everyone just milling around with nothing to do.

With no one knowing when the strike would be over, we decided to head down to Varanasi, and see some sights at the River Ganges while trying to find out any information about the strike from the international news, local news and friends in Kathmandu. It has been surprising how little international news coverage the strike in Nepal has received - despite the country having stood still by Maoist protests for nearly a week.

Coming away from the Nepali border (so near but so far...!), I took a photo of all the trucks lined up waiting to take supplies into Nepal, waiting patiently on both sides of the road - miles and miles of them.

Now the strike has finally been called off, we will be retracing our steps over night, hoping to arrive in Kathmandu tomorrow - FINALLY!!

My love/hate relationship with the Delhi to Kathmandu Overland Trip

So I could take a 1.5 hr flight from Delhi to Kathmandu, but when possible I travel overland to see new places in India and visit my leather tannery firsthand.

Its a mission of a journey that has taken me between 1.5 days to 5 days and can never be fully planned it seems! You have to get an overnight train from Delhi to Gorakhpur (12 hrs approx) then local bus to the border (3hrs) then rickshaw over the border, then its anything from 6 hrs to 13 hrs by bus to Kathmandu.

The first time I travelled overland across this route was from KTM down to Delhi in June 2003 when I left Nepal after five months teaching English in a rural community. That journey still makes me shudder when I think about sleeping on the rail platform as our train was delayed by hours in Gorakhpur, and then the 40 degree heat blasting through our non-AC carriage, which was full of Indians curiously looking at my friend Hannah's long blonde curly hair. Sweaty parched panic resulted in me having to jump off the train at one stop to find some bottled water, only for the train to start pulling off and some indian guy having to heave me onto the train from the low platform - funny in hindsight!

Since then, I have travelled up from Delhi to Kathmandu several times, always with far too much luggage - mainly first samples, supplies and presents for some of the kids of my producers. Last summer, on the border, I bumped into ten members of the Kandel family who I lived with in South Nepal during my 5 months teaching - I nearly choked on my masala tea with surprise! So with their insistence, I had another impromptu return to the village.

Also last year, I was stuck at the border for 10 hours, waiting to go in convoy with other buses because of a Maoist national strike, which is why I am apprehensive about our travel plans to get up to Kathmandu on Tuesday.

From today, there is a Maoist political strike nationwide in protest about the government, said to last 'indefinatly' until a compromise has been found. Though many of the strikes are non-violent, the transport strike stops people travelling on the main roads around Kathmandu at least, which affects all industry (with minimal work force as people cannot travel to work), export/import (eg, road freight from India) and of course, tourism, one of the country's main sources of income.

Check out today's BBC News report here

So fingers crossed for Tuesday!