The Long Road Home

Yesterday I rode into Budapest in Hungary. Today I’m really tired and havng a day off the bike. In the next couple of days, I’ll write about what’s now happening in CAMBODIA with the money you’ve given for that project, AND also announce the winner of the Virgin Atlantic competition… Meanwhile today here’s a short update about the project in Pakistan.

The media have been reporting quite a lot this week about the South Asian earthquake, because it’s now one year since it killed more than 73,000 people in north pakistan. During the past year, NGOs such as UNICEF, and the Red Cross Red Crescent have been helping people rebuild homes and schools etc.

But the NGOs also say there’s still lots of rebuilding to be done. And they say people’s mental state can be poor, with obvious signs amongst children especially of post-traumatic stress (eg nightmares, bed wetting, unexplained sudden crying, manic behaviour changes). Thousands of those who died were children, who were killed when their schools collapsed on top of them.

Parents and community members tell field workers that they would like to see activities in addition to education which could bring normality back to the surviving children’s lives.

In the affected areas, children play in the streets, mainly cricket, and girls and women do not normally participate. Sports and games are almost never implemented in schools, there are=A0no after-school sports or recreation programmes, and no sports/play facilities exist.

In this context, we are raising money to enable NGO Right to Play (RTP) to set up simple sports programmes to help the earthquake-affected children have some fun, stay safe and healthy, and regain confidence.

RTP has already run similar programmes in Pakistan, for children at Afghan refugee camps, with great success reducing problems such as truancy and drug abuse. The RTP field workers have left the Afghan camps now, as planned, but sports activities, including girls’ cricket and badminton teams, are now still running as a result of their work.

To run similar initiatives now with pakistan’s earthquake survivors, RTP needs just under 300,000 USD. We are trying to raise a chunk of this, and RTP has meanwhile been hunting other sources to raise the rest.

We’ve raised over 25,000 USD thanks to Deutsche Bank, Prudential, Crosby Capital and other corporate donors, and lots of individual contributors.

The very good news is that RTP has now received 280,000 USD from a group of Swiss donors for this Pakistan programme. This means that the RTP project, which aims to reach 5,000-10,000 children, can get started late Oct early November.

So we look forward to see how the implementation progresses… Thanks to the RTP staff, especially Julie, for updates, including photos, which I hope we can put up on this site (thanks Ben - again).

As I mentioned above, there’s also news from the Cambodia project working with street children. I’ll write up about that later (thanks a lot Lisa at ADM for your update from Sihanoukville. ) AND, with help from Angelina Wong at Virgin Atlantic Hong Kong, also let you know who won the free flights competition, which lots of people entered, especially from Deutsche Bank and Reuters.

Goodnight from Budapest! Now I’m going to plan my route up from Hungary into Slovakia, and then sleep.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 7th, 2006 at 7:46 pm and is filed under Hungary, On the Road. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.