Rehabilitating Children

IN a conflict, while adults fight, it's the children and women who pay price. Children in many places of the country have been directly or indirectly affected by the seven-year-old insurgency. Scores of them have perished due to no fault of their own, but due to having been purely unfortunate in coming between the cross-fire of the armed adults. With the cease-fire in place now, hopes abound that peace may return to Nepal, though the road ahead may be excruciatingly bumpy. While negotiations proceed between the government and the Maoists hopefully sooner rather than later, the issue of rehabilitation of the victims of the war must also come to the fore forcefully. The issue of child victims of the war, needless to say, must receive the greatest attention. To continue to ignore their plight even after the cessation of hostilities would be nothing short of a scandal. While little can be done about the almost 150 children whose lives have reportedly been claimed by the war, thousands of orphaned and displaced children need immediate care and support. At a programme on Monday organised by six social organisations working for children and women to form an alliance called Child Rights Watch-Nepal, one of the speakers disputed the above figures and claimed many more children may have been killed.

While it is important to get to the bottom of the truth as to how many were killed for record as well as for some help to the families of the dead, the focus now should be on the living children. Orphaned children's plight must receive immediate attention. Often with the breadwinner of the family gone, mothers are suffering great hardships in raising these children. The government's already announced package for the victims of the war must address this issue seriously when concrete programmes are implemented. Organisations like the Child Rights Watch must continue to lobby for special measures to bring some succour to the child victims of the war. Their basic needs for survival and growth must be taken care of. In this endeavour, both the government and the civil society organisations could play a crucial role by joining hands. But first there must be an absolute realisation on the part of the agencies working to rehabilitate the victims of war, that children should be a special target group for relief and assistance to enable them to get on better with their lives.

Keeping Everest Clean

WITH a view to facilitate mountaineers attempting to scale the world's highest peak, Mt. Everest, with access to a website, an internet cafe, as per a news item carried by this daily the other day, is to be operated at the 5,300m-high Khumbu Glacier by Tsering Gyaltsen Sherpa, the grandson of Tenzing Norgay Sherpa who, along with Sir Edmund Hillary, stood on top of the world's highest pinnacle for the very first time in 1953. The earnings from the internet cafe, as per the same report, would be utilised to purchase equipment for the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee, a team that annually collects the garbage left behind by mountaineering teams trying to climb Mt. Everest. That the surroundings of Mt. Everest are no more as pristine as they used to be during the time when Tenzing Norgay Sherpa and Sir Edmund Hillary embarked on their historic quest to conquer the world's highest peak is by now an open secret. For this unnatural scene and equally unenviable sight, the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee as well as other national and international organisations geared to collect the garbage from the Mt. Everest area every year may have to dash off their warning memos to the innumerable mountaineers who, like greedy bees instinctively drawn to a nectar-filled flower, make a beeline to the world's highest peak. And, in their singular quest to stand on top of Mt. Everest, never failed to leave behind tons, if not kilos, of garbage all over the very mountain that accorded them the golden chance to include their names and exploits in the Halls of Mountaineering Fame.

More worrying to note is that in the wake of each and every Everest expedition team's attempt, the quantity of garbage seems to be not only growing bigger but the cost entailed in collect it also seems to be rising higher, much to the chagrin of the plucky volunteers who sign up every year with the organisations specially created to collect the Everest area's garbage. Or to volunteers like Tsering Gyaltsen Sherpa who came up with the innovative scheme to generate the much-needed money to finance the yearly garbage collecting campaign in the Everest region. While their yeoman service should be duly commended by all, the concerned authorities need to renew their efforts to enforce the existing regulations concerning the mandatory retrieval of all kinds of garbage generated by the mountaineering expeditions in the Everest region.