Keeping ahead of the jungle during the monsoon: Our team on the farm, cutting rampant lantana on the playground, and stuffing bags with collected waste plastic.

Following Nishtha’s presentation at the State Waste Management Workshop in Shimla, a team of 32 Block Development officers, Junior Assistants, Technical Advisers and the Pardhans of 20 villages from Una and Hamirpur Districts visited Nishtha this week. Despite heavy rain we explained and demonstrated our program and they expressed interest and considered how they might implement our education, plastic collection and block making. We feel very encouraged that some progress has been made towards controlling the plastic waste in a wider area.

Vijay Kumar and Vijay Bhadwaj attended a waste management seminar held in Shimla. Their presentation of our work to educate people, collect plastic waste and make blocks suitable for construction was admired and other Panchayat’s are being encouraged to follow our lead.

21 students are now enrolled for Nishtha’s college sponsorship. Last Sunday the computer room was crowded, everyone anxious to learn from Vijay and Ankush. Later Puja came for English class which was a lot of fun and so wonderful to see the students all talking!

Today Dr. Barbara inspected the farm which is coming along nicely now, giving encouragement to our farming team. Mohinder and 3 others went to help the government forest office plant trees on a piece of land they are protecting and Suresh and Goodie worked together to prepare our excellent natural cough mixture. Everything is going well now the rains have come!

International Widows Day on 23^rd June was marked by Nishtha single women organizing a noisy rally of 120 women who marched in Dharamshala with banners bearing slogans demanding single women rights. Converging on the office of the District Commissioner, our activists handed over a memorandum of their demands and petitions regarding particular cases which were mostly referred to other offices. Nishtha provided refreshments for all the participants since most had come from far away villages to make their voices heard.

Nishtha banners encouraging everyone to take care of our water supplies by using them carefully and not throwing or burning waste plastic made a big impact at Rakkar Mela and our stall outside on the road on World Environment Day.

A big thank you to artist Shivajit who has been holding fun drawing sessions for the children this week. He has also very kindly donated two of his paintings to the Community Center where they are proudly displayed.

Today we delivered a fresh stock of toys to 5 baby crèches. The children were a bit scared of the blow up creatures at first but were really happy to get more play things.