Nepal's hope for war orphans

Children have been major victims of the war

By Daniel Lak BBC correspondent in Kathmandu

No-one in Nepal is quite sure how many children have been adversely affected by the past seven years of war between Maoist rebels and the security forces.

One estimate is that at least 10,000 children have been orphaned, and more than a 100,000 forced to leave their villages.

Both sides have killed the parents of these children and now we put the war far away, outside the orphanage walls

Bal Krishna Joshi

It is clear that the 16 boys and girls who live at the 'Sahara' orphanage in this western border town are just a microcosm of a nationwide problem.

Take Hira Pariyar. In 1996, the year that Nepal's Maoist insurgency began, her father was shot by a group of policemen who were searching for rebels in her village.

Her mother, like so many rural widows in Nepal, went off with another man and left her daughter alone.

Hira had to work in a stone quarry, crushing rock.

'Natural teacher'

A helpful local government official brought her to the Sahara group a few years later, and now Hira is the de facto tutor for all the other girls in her dormitory.

"She's a natural teacher," says supervisor Bal Krishna Joshi.

The warm, peaceful room where the girls sleep and play is a world away from the war that robbed them of their families.

Mr Joshi says orphanage policy is to find out what happened to the children. Then they move on to create as loving and safe an environment as possible.

"We've got several kids who've seen torture and death first hand, there's one child who was forced to travel with the Maoists and give speeches. Both sides have killed the parents of these children and now we put the war far away, outside the orphanage walls," says Mr Joshi.

A journalist by profession, Mr Joshi has all but given up his pen and writing pad for work as a full-time volunteer with the Sahara organisation.

But he says: "I saw this as a reporter; I wrote about it, I heard the excuses of both the warring parties, justifying what was happening so I decided that I had to help people directly, not indirectly. And here I am."

Serious studies

Each morning, Mr Joshi walks with the children to the nearby Bal Mandir School, run by a local Hindu charity.

They make their way along streets clogged with bicycles and cycle rickshaws, holding each other's hands and looking serious about the day's studies.

Nepal's schools have been hit hard by the insurgency - another way in which children have been affected by the war.

The longest serving teacher at Bal Mandir, Rama Thapa, says she and her colleagues have been threatened by the rebels in the past and were occasionally too afraid to even open the school.

"Sometimes they wanted money, sometimes it was a political issue, teaching politics at school," says Ms Thapa, standing in front of her primary class.

"But now we have a ceasefire so the first priority should be to help these children catch up on their studies and get over the trauma of war."

'Zone of peace'

The most well-known child rights activist in Nepal, Gauri Pradhan, agrees and is aggressively getting his message across.

Before the current ceasefire began on the 29th of January, Mr Pradhan was pushing for children to be declared as a "zone of peace", as people who should simply be left out of the conflict at all costs.

Now he is using the truce to make the case for helping the child victims of conflict first.

"Of all Nepalis, they are the least culpable in this war, the least to blame. What child ever started a war - they don't have a choice.

"If we don't help them first, then we aren't serious about peace and rehabilitation."