Three Months in Nepal: A Story of Travel, Teaching and Child Labour [Paperback]

'Three months in Nepal' shows the powerful immediacy of book in the form of a blog/diary. Hazel's account of her trek in Nepal followed by an intensive period of teaching carried me along intensely keen to find out what was happening day by day in the time she spent there.

During the trek she fell behind the others because of her asthma, and already you feel her determination not to be beaten and her stout heartedness as she struggles to finish each hard day's walk.

Throughout the book we go with her on visits to parks, to friends, and around Kathmandu; buying a bike, dodging serious water bombs while cycling on a water festival day; attempting to buy essential items. They are all described with a fresh unselfconscious style which I enjoy enormously. Her descriptions of friends and colleagues are frank, and you always sense a strong empathy with the very poor, the destitute, the children. Of a child beggar: "There is a tiny, dirty child sitting on the ground with an even tinier baby on his lap. They are filthy and look as if they have been there an age. He looks too tired to beg......I wonder where his parents are, or if they are orphans. I still find it so hard being jolted between affluence and despair."

Living at a school in Patan, Hazel was asked to co-direct a theatre project for the International Labour Organisation ( ILO). The idea behind the project was to take a group of children from privileged backgrounds at a prestigious school to research the lives of seriously underprivileged children in order to expose through drama the appalling extent of child labour and the severity of the lives of the child labourers. With Sunil Patel (the Artistic Director of Aarohan Theatre) she gets the two groups working together to devise their own plays and also the lyrics and music to accompany them. At the end of her time in Nepal the both groups of children perform them to a large attentive audience. The very important element here is that the school children, who are likely to become the administrators when they are older, should understand what is happening to the thousands of children who are employed, bonded, or act as slave labour in Nepal.

First they explore how children get into these situations where they are so exploited. Many are sent away because their families cannot support them; some send money back to their families; some are thrown out by a parent or step parent; or run away because they are abused. Few of them have proper places to sleep, a regular diet, running water or sanitation. They are often sick, and their growth is stunted because of the hardship. There are a few lights in the darkness: a morning school where children can study for free before they go to work, and there is an orphanage for disabled children. Hazel becomes involved with this last organisation and has set up a charity. (see later)

There are 4 plays in all. The first is about the estimated 4,000 rag pickers, children who live on the streets and work on the waste dumps, risking their health to collect bags of glass, plastic and metal and sell it on.
The second play focuses on the trafficking of girls; up to 2 million girls and are trafficked annually into prostitution. Sometimes their parents sell them, sometimes they are tricked into a `marriage' and taken to the brothels of India. Globally the present rate of trafficking in children is already ten times higher then the transatlantic slave trade at its peak
The third play centres on the brick works which are outside Kathmandu. Students from the school go on a coach to see the work for themselves. In her blog Hazel describes the scene so graphically that I feel I have been there, watching the children scoop up the clay, form bricks, and carry heavy hods of bricks around the site. Whole families work on the site, with the younger children carrying smaller hods, but still back breaking work and with little food or shelter. We all feel Hazel's disgust as she watches the privileged children drink bottled drinks in front of the brick working kids whose water comes from ditches on the site left by the clay digging. " We are like visitors from another planet so vast is the divide".
The last play is about domestic servants who may be given a place to eat and sleep but are exploited by the families and rarely have a chance to go to school.

Hazel describes the many obstacles to her work, the lack of space to rehearse, the difficulty of getting everyone in the right place at the right time "My experience to date suggests deadlines in Nepal are, at best, haphazardly understood." Through it all her sheer doggedness to ensure the project succeeded shows through. As it is a blog there is a suspension in the writing and you wonder, will she be able to achieve her goals against so many odds? You must read the book to find out. I will end with one last quote: after the play performance, speaking of the child labourers involved: "It is magic to see them open up and begin to enjoy themselves because joy is something that is so lacking in so much of their lives."

I read this book not long after it was published. I was interested in reading about travel in that part of the world as I had been in India and Thailand some years before and have also taught drama in the UK and Japan. I found her account of the trek very funny - and I often laughed aloud - as I could identify with her determination to continue, despite coming in last to the camp every night. The pace changed in the second part of the book where she gave details of the people she stayed and worked with so that part was - understandably - rather less of an easy, humorous read. Overall the book told me a lot about the hardship of people's lives and the efforts that some in the west make to improve that situation, and it validated for me the international language of performance.

By the way, I understand that Hazel Roy is currently involved (2012) with the Moradokmai Theatre Troupe in Thailand where young people learn traditional Thai theatre, dance and music and Western art forms while practising self-sufficiency in their life-style. So it seems that her enthusiasm for this kind of project continues.

It is great when people record their imaginative projects giving us a chance to be inspired.

The early trek gives you the chance to think - "what if I..." Later, through the story of the theatre production examining child labour, you learn how it benefits hugely from the creativity of the performing child actors. It is a a very good mixture of astute observation and and an excellent recount of a very demanding production. Its legacy is the continuing links which benefit both the writer and the theatre group.