And now for something completely different . . .

Remember that initial post where I asked,
Do I have a plan?
Sort of . . .
Am I willing to change it 100 times?

Good thing I said yes. And meant it.

Here is a brief recap from my first post of what I thought I was going to be doing here:

"The Mountain Fund teaches Nonviolent Communication to women who are living with domestic violence as a way to help them diffuse some of the violence in their lives. This dovetails with two of my interests: all the work I have done with victims of domestic violence over the years and my growing interest in conflict resolution. I emailed Scott the next day and he wrote back immediately, telling me that although they do not ordinarily take short term volunteers for that program he would find work for me."

That was about all I knew and I was totally prepared to roll with whatever the work turned out to be when I got here.

When I got here yesterday, as Scott was talking about the condition of women in Nepal, I asked, "So, tell me more about what I will be doing with Nonviolent Communication." He gruffly answered, "That's a sore subject right now. I'll tell you more tomorrow."

Here's what I know now: Scott sent a man named Karki, who is a life coach/corporate trainer with whom Scott has done lots of work before, to New Mexico to train with Marshall Rosenberg, the guy who invented Nonviolent Communication. The plan was for Karki to return to Kathmandu then work with various organizations here who serve battered women and, if those organizations thought this technique would be useful for their clients, train the people in the organizations on Nonviolent Communication so they could teach it to their clients. I was to work with Karki to develop the presentation to the aid organizations. Scott had, in fact, planned these trainings specifically around the dates I was going to be here.

What I have since learned is that Karki left town yesterday without telling Scott and will not be back for 2 weeks. Oops.

There's a new plan, though, and I think it's going to be great. Scott wants to shift the focus of his organization to women and girls. This is an idea with a lot of currency in development these days thanks in no small part to Nicolas Kristof, the columnist who wrote the book Half the Sky which posits that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. He persuasively argues that the payoffs from this approach are huge completely out of proportion with the amount of money needed. He also argues that we have to think of issues such as domestic violence, HIV, malnutrition, sex trafficking, genital mutilation, and various other forms of egregious discrimination as human rights issues, not "women's" issues.

So Scott has this idea based in part on the microfinance model of Kiva, in part on the grassroots journalism approach of India Unheard, and in part on Nike's The Girl Effect project. My job? Go talk to various women's organizations here in Kathmandu and figure out whether they have clients whose can be helped by this as yet somewhat unformed approach. In other words, with a vague model of an approach, gather information about whether there are women who can be helped with something resembling it and, assuming there are, refine the model to create a new program that will directly connect sponsors with women to give them the resources they need to gain independence from the cycle of violence that traps them.

Okay, I can do that. (Though I am not unhappy that it looks like I will have help from a couple of other volunteers, one from England and one from India, both of whom have some contacts with organizations here already.)

Scott is shocked that I'm not pissed about the Nonviolent Communication project falling through. Frankly, I almost think this sounds more interesting.