Graduating Good Workers

A few weeks ago I travelled to Nepal to attend a big event in that country: 18 project staff were graduating from our Viva Equip People programme. 18 might not sound like very many – until you remember that Christians account for less than 3% of Nepal’s population, and that each one of these graduates will have a ripple effect on their church, project and community.

Viva Equip People is a big deal, especially here in Nepal where many children are at risk, and often little value is given to them. The people we’re equipping are working with children at risk in local projects or churches, and are amazingly compassionate and hard-working. But their work with children can be limited because they have very few opportunities to develop themselves and improve their work.


The course involves bringing together a group of project workers for training in the essential attitudes and skills of working with children: things like understanding children’s rights and needs, and skills in listening to children. They also learn how to best develop their work with children who suffer from such things as a lack of education, or being in forced labour.

Often these workers have great intentions and passionate hearts, but no background knowledge about protecting and helping children. And Nepalese children certainly need help and protection. On a daily basis there are many – often despite the best efforts of parents, friends and family – who face being trafficked into India as sex workers, forced labourers and domestic workers in unfriendly homes where they’re especially vulnerable to abuse. In their own homes and villages they may be threatened by physical and sexual abuse, which in turn leads to homelessness as they take to the streets to flee the violence. Many of them have parents but never see them because they’ve left to find work; others lost their parents in the recent Maoist insurgency. And Nepalese girls face discrimination and hardship every day because of their gender.

Thanks in part to the development of our partner CarNetNepal, and the programme Viva Equip People, Christian child care workers in Nepal are learning how to help the children around them and urgently trying to reach more. Through the Nepal network a Parentless Children Working Group has been formed – these people advocate with local churches to get to work caring for children.

One inspirational leader is Sharmila Ghimire. Sharmila is married to CarNetNepal co-ordinator Dhan Raj. She runs a programme for street boys. Her approach to rescuing and rehabilitating the boys was “all heart”, she said to me – she had great intentions, but didn’t quite know how to connect with the boys. After she completed a VEP course, Sharmila could communicate better with children and is much better able to offer them personal counselling. This has meant more success getting the boys reintegrated with their own families, since she can help them talk through their problems and address deep family issues.

A recent VEP graduate from the town of Butwal, Pastor Sunil, had his view of children changed completely by the course. Before the course he focused his energy entirely on the adults of his congregation and didn’t think children were useful members of the church. He only attended Viva Equip People because he thought it might help him learn something new about working with children in the congregation. But his whole mindset was so changed by what he learned – that children are integral members of the church and have valuable opinions – that he not only made the children’s ministry in his church more effective, but started a new ministry to reach out to the vulnerable children in his community!

The Viva Equip People course takes a year, so graduation is a big event. I travelled with network leaders and trainers from Kathmandu on an eight hour bus-ride (in business suits!), and then we slept in a local church before joining the graduation ceremony. Our graduates proudly wore their gowns and showed off their certificates, and even composed a song about caring for children and protecting children’s rights. Another exciting thing was that there were nine men and nine women graduating … in Nepal, professional groups are usually skewed towards only including men.

While I was in Nepal I had the chance to meet many of the frontline workers from the network there. One of them was Pastor Surya, one of the Viva Equip People graduates. Surya received support to start a programme in his community to protect children at risk. VEP helped him realise that children have special requirements and need extra protection, and he was bold enough to take his church in a completely new direction by acting on it.

Viva Equip People is having such great results that the Nepal network has a vision for it: they want every Christian child care worker in the country to go through VEP training! This little Christian community in the mainly Hindu country is having an impact beyond its numbers. Through courses like Viva Equip People they’ve learned that the church – them! – can succeed in its responsibility to demonstrate what family should look like to the people of Nepal. That means welcoming everyone, standing up for the rights of women and children, and taking care of the poor and oppressed. These 18 VEP graduates are going out into Nepalese communities to achieve that goal.

I spent the other part of my trip checking up on the progress of the Daughter project in southern Nepal. Keep an eye out for another post from me on some of the things that are happening through Daughter.


~ Ian, Viva Asia Co-Ordinator


Learn more about Viva Equip People at http://www.viva.org/QualityCare/