A coat of paint.

Namaste

Would you like to spend all day working in a room where the walls are covered in ingrained dirt, old graffiti and torn and faded papers? Would you feel inspired to work harder?  What message does a working environment like this give to the workers who use it daily?

Sadly some classrooms in the government schools I work with in Nepal are like this, and yet we expect young students to come to school every day, want to be there and feel inspired about their education.  I feel desperately sad at the state of these classrooms.  When a group of young volunteers offered to paint some classrooms I was delighted.

Twelve ICS volunteers, young people between the ages of 18 and 25, of both British and Nepali nationality, wanted to help. They work and live in pairs, each Nepali volunteer with a British partner, and spend 3 months at their placement, working on community projects.  Everyone gains from this arrangement. The Nepali volunteer travels and lives in a totally different place to his or her home, and through practise speaking English to their partner, develops fluency and correct pronunciation. Their British counterpart travels, works and lives within a totally different country and culture.  Of course, the community where they work gains from their unpaid work too.

The volunteers arrived by bus and we immediately set off to walk to the school, about an hour away, carrying all paint and tools needed.  The day was a public holiday so there were no students at school, just some children playing, very curious to know what we were doing there.

Our first job, before painting could start, was to clean the walls and remove all the old paper stuck to them.  Within minutes of arriving everyone was busy with buckets of water, cloths and scrapers clearing the walls of the first classroom.  The ingrained dirt was almost impossible to remove, as were the faded and torn pictures stuck to the wall. This classroom had not seen a coat of paint for many years.

Once clean, one group of volunteers began painting this first room, whilst the rest continued with cleaning the walls of the next classroom.  A production line evolved: the painting team following the cleaning group, classroom by classroom. 

The walls were so filthy that the first coat of paint hardly covered the dirt, and so a second coat was applied to the walls when the first was dry. Eventually three coats of paint were needed to achieve a good clean result. 

Despite the heat of the day, these young volunteers worked incredibly hard, helped by one teacher and the caretaker from the school. After three hours of concentrated effort a halt was called; the paint we had brought with us was all gone!  

Two of the four classrooms were finished, and the other two were ready for another coat early next morning when we could return with more paint. By midday the next day all was complete and the extra paint finished.  The classrooms walls were clean and white and the rooms ready for use again. 

 Look at the before and after photographs of one of the classrooms.  

Before.

After painting!

What a fantastic difference! Thank you ICS volunteers for giving up your free time for this project.

In the morning the delight on the young students faces, at their transformed classrooms, was reward in itself for the hard work.  They stood and gazed at the walls with beaming smiles. There were claps and cheers of appreciation for the volunteer painters. 

What a worthwhile project this was.  In 6 hours, with 12 volunteers and at the cost of 6,000 rupees for paint (around £42), four classrooms have been transformed.  Now it is time for other schools in Nepal to follow this lead and improve their classroom environments!  

Pheri bheTaulaa