Furthering Nishtha’s collaboration with Dharamshala Waste Warriors, last week our local school children engaged in an exciting cleanup program along with 70 youngsters from Delhi. It was a challenging but very productive day with 6 large sacks of plastic waste and glass bottles collected from the local forest area and the production of a series of brilliant environmental posters. At the end they all enjoyed tea and samosas together, expressing their delight at meeting and working together for the sake of raising awareness of the damage done to the environment by casually discarding  our waste 

100 single women celebrated “Bheena Dooj”  on 1st Nov along with our Nishtha Trustees, staff and some students. They put together a wonderful program of songs, talks plays and dances, appreciating their sisterhood and support for each other on  this special occasion. The students performed a Gaddi dance in full costume and the school children joined in with a skit about the environment and the need to protect trees.

20-25 children started attending tuition classes in the community centre at the beginning of October in preparation for their exams. Two teachers, Sakshi and Sanjay focus on maths which is the most difficult and worrying subject for every student but also help the children with their other subjects when needed.  

Following the advice of the Director of Agriculture, North Region when he visited our farm, we decided to plant some tea plants on unused parts of the land. The Government tea department provided 150 tea plants at a subsidized rate and trained our farming team who then dug over 100 pits in unused spaces and planted the tea plants according to the instruction given by tea department.

A three day leadership training was organised to enhance our single women activists’ abilities to think critically, lead effectively and work with a positive attitude. Our trainer, Manju used lots of interesting practical activities for this group who are not so comfortable with reading and writing.

A very busy team protecting the newly planted trees from the local goats with bamboo tree guards.

Rakkar youth social and environment club held a meeting in Nishtha CC hall to plan their upcoming program. The club has 12 active members and are urging more youth in local area to join so they can work impressively and effectively in the village.

During August Nishtha sponsorship students have been using their weekly Sunday meeting to learn about the present environment crisis. We talked about the causes of the crisis, watched clips about movements and individual efforts to save the environment and, convinced of the importance of tree planting, we planted over 100 trees. We want to try to understand how we can live sustainably on this planet.

Nishtha Farming team busy at work between monsoon downpours keeping the land in order and preparing for tea planting.

Ravinder Kaur held a very successful Nishtha summer vacation program on the theme of Environmental awareness. They studied the big picture issues: global warming and how our lives are dependent on the condition of our world and also the details: to protect trees, grow plants, not to waste resources and food and above all not to throw plastic!