School Children
Carrying One’s Own Agenda

By Prakash Dahal

NOT all fighters carry their own agenda. In our case, we tend to swell up in pride carrying others’ agenda. And, we do so quite zealously because we see a fairly good chance of churning out personal benefits from them. The NGOs and even GOs are no exception. They toe the line which others carve for them. Others hang catchy slogans in their tongue tips, and they blare them every now and then in one or the other sponsored conferences.

Meets

In conferences and seminars held to discuss children, the western world trained Phds and the recognised authorities are found portraying the pathetic plight of children in this way, " You see, in Rio de Janeiro, I saw children scavenging tissue papers from the filthy garbage. And you know what they did with that? They dipped them in water and ate it for supper because they had nothing to eat".

Great! The Phds. and the recognized authorities in suit and necktie have their nose in air having said so. Because, they are not talking about the stinking Khates of Durbar Marg or Pashupatinath who are scavenging food through filthy green containers or the heap of garbage that the municipality has left on the roadside to decay. But, they are talking about the children of Sao Paulo or Rio de Janeiro while discussing children issues in some or the other posh hotel auditorium in Kathmandu.

They are not fools! They know that they will look stupid talking about Kathmandu’s street children because every Tom, Dick and Harry has seen them. But, not everyone has been to Brazil , hence, talking about them would give them an air of superiority, at least in this country.

A painful reality of how we perceive things, we live by it.

The lacuna in development; resources dry away in Kathmandu while men and women in the western hills live with parched lips and hungry bellies; is perhaps due these foreign agenda carrying Phds. and authorities.

Why should the man in tie suit speak up for scavengers? Why should the wife of politicians in silk saris deliver speech and present papers in the star hotel auditoriums on the status of rural women? Why should the urban women rolling around in limousine fly across the ocean to attend seminar and conferences on women with disabilities? Why should those with beautiful eyes sign agreements with donors for BVIs ( Blind and Visually Impaired)?

Why not the BVIs speak up for themselves? Why not the women from Ghalekharka, and Bhalche come forward with their agenda and the women in silk saris rally behind them? Why not the women with disabilities parade to the National Planning Commission and put their demands aggressively?

To answer this ‘why’, it may be difficult for many of us.

But, it’s not for children. Because, the innocent children have no idea of carrying anyone’s agenda. Their experienced parents are there to do the job. Therefore, they can speak up for themselves and their fellow children. And, they have done so.

Few high school students in their teens organised themselves under what they call Students’ Awareness Society to help their fellow kids in the streets. And to grease the wheels of their tiny institution, they took up the job of publishing a bi-lingual magazine in which they chose to portray the actual plight of the orphan and abandoned children with a tinge of emotion, struggling in the hostile and dark alleys of Kathmandu. And, they did it. They are neither the first nor the last ones to do so. Hundreds of NGOs have done similar jobs. These days, one can see dozens of developmental publications sprouting on donors’ funding, displayed on the shelves of NGOs, INGOs and Kathmandu’s book stores. But the children are different. They are different at least in two ways; They know no donors; they didn’t carry anyone’s agenda but their own.

Says Caesar Rana, editor," We want to gain confidence that we too are capable of doing things on our own". Caesar Rana and Ashray Malla, editors duo, the teenage school-goers say, they wanted to raise fund to help their fellow children who have become the victims of the conspiracy of circumstances. With this mission in mind, the boys came up with a 36 pages magazine "Environment and Street Children".

The magazine is kind of a research work, exploring the pains and the sufferings of the children who live by begging, scavenging scraps of food in the disposed garbage on the road side. The boys have talked to these street children and they have narrated the story as it has been told to them.

What may be distinct in the research works of these school-going children is that they neither possess any research background nor have they been trained.

Their presentation is crude and therefore natural. For these boys, the job was never easy. Because, the street children they wanted to talk to were reluctant to answer any of their questions. And, the methodology they applied to extract information may remain quite interesting for professionals.

Nevertheless, they have done the job. They have spoken up for their fellow kids. Both the form and the content of their publication stand good by Nepalese standard.

Insight

The book is full of case studies which give an insight into how the children descend down from the hills and disappear in a world made of Kathmandu’s dark and dingy alleys.

Caesar Rana and Ashray Malla have done it. And, they have done it sans donors’ funding, carrying no one’s but their own agenda.

Books On Fatima Mystery Closed

By Victor L. Simpson

It was kept under wraps by four popes, tantalized millions of people and raised fears of doomsday scenarios.

Question

Now, after 83 years, the Vatican has closed its books on the so-called Third Secret of Fatima, leading many to ask: What was the big deal?

"No great mystery is revealed, nor is the future unveiled," said Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican’s guardian of orthodoxy.

After all the speculation, he acknowledged, it "will probably prove disappointing or surprising."

Over the centuries, the Vatican has received so many reports and claims of visions, revelations and "supernatural" events like bleeding Madonnas that it has a special office to study them.

The Disciplinary Office of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith looks into them from a theological standpoint while its medical-scientific committee conducts investigations "to ensure there is no deception," said Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, an assistant to Ratzinger.

But none has held the public’s interest like the story of the three shepherd children who claimed the Virgin Mary appeared above an oak tree in the Portuguese town of Fatima on May 13, 1917, and talked to them.

The first two secrets have long been known and were said to have foretold the end of World War I and the outbreak of World War II and the rise and fall of Soviet communism - a "prediction of the immense damage that Russia would do to humanity by abandoning the Christian faith and embracing communist totalitarianism," as the Vatican put it.

But the long silence over the contents of the third secret fueled speculation that it was so horrible that no pope wanted to reveal it.

By the Vatican’s account, it was put to paper on Jan. 3, 1944, by the sole surviving shepherd child, Sister Lucia de Jesus dos Santos, and entrusted to the bishop of Leiria, Portugal.

On April 4, 1957, under the papacy of Pius XII, the bishop sent the sealed envelope for safekeeping to the secret archives of the Holy Office, as the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith was then called.

According to the Vatican, it was read by Pope John XXIII in 1959 and Paul VI in 1965, but both men decided not to reveal the contents.

It remained in the archives until Pope John Paul II, recovering in the hospital from an attempt on his life in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981, asked to read it, the Vatican said in its June 26 account. He was apparently struck by the coincidence of dates - May 13 was the same date the Virgin is said to have first appeared before the children in Fatima.

But it was only when the pope returned to Fatima on May 13 this year to beatify two of the Fatima children that the Vatican decided to offer a first glimpse of the "secret."

With the pope sitting behind him, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican secretary of state, stunned the crowd by announcing that the secret foretold the shooting of John Paul in 1981.

The Vatican promised further explanation, and this was offered on June 26 when it released Sister Lucia’s 62-line handwritten letter. It describes a pope "on his hands and knees at the foot of a big cross" who "was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him."

Since John Paul survived, there would seem to be a discrepancy.

A longstanding critic of the Vatican’s handling of the secret, the Fatima Center of Fort Erie, Ontario, said on its Web site that the latest interpretation was a "whitewash." It said the account had "nothing to do with Pope John Paul II not being shot dead" by Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca.

But the Vatican had an explanation.

It was inevitable that John Paul "should see in it his own fate," Ratzinger suggested in his written commentary, noting that the pope had come very close to death and would later say that the Virgin Mary "guided the bullet’s path" to spare him.

"That here a `mother’s hand’ had deflected the fateful bullet only shows once more that there is no immutable destiny, that faith and prayer are forces which can influence history and that in the end prayer is more powerful than bullets and faith more powerful than armies," Ratzinger wrote.

As to why the Vatican waited so long to release the text, Ratzinger was vaguer.

The account, he said, was "fuzzy."

"It didn’t make sense to release indecipherable information that could only lead to confusion," the German cardinal said at a news conference. "In the light of history you can decipher the story."

Some have suggested that the Vatican feared repercussions because of the anti-Soviet tone of the Fatima phenomenon.

Bertone, Ratzinger’s assistant, said in a newspaper interview that some still felt it was premature to release it "but that the pope had rightly believed the time had come."

Despite all the fuss its secrecy clearly helped create, the Vatican took a further step back.

Helpful

It said such private revelations as Fatima are helpful but the faithful are not obliged to believe them.

"It should be kept in mind that prophecy in the biblical sense does not mean to predict the future but to explain the will of God for the present, and therefore to show the right path to take for the future," Ratzinger said.

In The Name Of Plenty

By PNK

THE monsoon is here bringing its bounty to be spread along the length and breadth of the country. The rivers and lakes have more water. It will enhance the glory of the country as the No.2 rich in water resources. It’s a fact that gives us much pleasure while talking to others. More than the pride, it gives us a sense of being something in the global context though it might just be hollow.

A rich country that Nepal is when one considers its natural endowments are consi-dered but falls flat the next moment when it comes to checking the people’s living standard. Herein one may have to forget those who live in spacious buildings and drive about in imported and big-sized vehicles. Look the other side and you can see the farmer struggling to make ends meet.

Though the rain drops fall like pearls, it gives solace but for a while. The next instant it’s all gone and subsistence farming remains. The son of the soil often goes hungry just because the small piece of land doesn’t provide all the year round. Poverty also remains in the land farmed as rich.

The myriad problems see no solution. The springs are there but not the spring that heralds a season of abundance. Only a small percentage of the population have piped water. Not all in the cities have a tap in their houses there are many who depend on public taps or wells for their supply of water.

It’s like the coming of electricity and homes shone. But the inadequate supply of power led to load shedding a reality much to the discomfiture of those who had taken it for granted. Such people number only 15 per cent of the total population.

Like electricity, water supply also gets regular holidays. Water may not flow from the tap but the necessity does not end. If there is no electricity one can survive. But without water...

To live in the city and that also in Kathmandu may be the dream of many. Those in the city don’t want to exchange it for living in the villages. Why? The reasons are obvious. The urbanites don’t want to breathe fresh air, eat unadulterated food, and hit the bed as soon as darkness arrives. For them the cities are perfect places. In a city, water supply is given once in two or three days, there are load shedding schedules, the roads are overcrowded, pollution is much in the air, people are indifferent and so on.

The rich drive around on potholed roads but they are content to sit back and enjoy in the comfort of their cars. For them mineral water is there to quench the thirst and if need be for other purposes like in the bathroom. But for an ordinary person there is not sitting back: no water probably means no cooked food to eat and dirty clothes to wear. Gone are the days when one could take a dip in the numerous streams and rivers: they are highly polluted.

The people in the villages don’t make a hue and cry even if they are suffering but in the city the media has a big role in highlighting the issues. And the most interesting aspect is that the concerned authorities can switch role to that of a hearing impaired person.