Mountain Fund Volunteer Visitor Center

Every year thousands of tourists come to Nepal to climb these and other peaks or to trek the Annapurna Circuit, Everest base camp trek, the Langtang trek or one of the more remote treks in Nepal.

Many tourists do not come with the intention of volunteering their time but find themselves moved and compelled to volunteer once they see the country and meet the people of Nepal.

Nepal is the poorest country in SE Aisa.

• Average Income is $200 per year
• GDP per capita is $1500 per year
• 1/3 of Nepal is without clean water
• 85% have no access to health care
• 80% of Nepalis are farmers
• Life expectancy in Nepal is 60
• ½ of the population is illiterate (higher rates for women)
• 47% of the population is unemployed

Volunteering is a cost-effective way of providing a range of social and welfareservices, but it is not cost-free. In order to flourish, volunteerism requires aneffective infrastructure, both at the national and local level, to help mobilize supportand match the volunteers to appropriate host organizations and tasks. Source: Volunteerism in Nepal – 2001 UN Report

Volunteers to Nepal

• Contribute nearly 5% to the GDP of the country
• Volunteering helps in social integration, particularly for those who are excluded or marginalized.

I am constantly asked on the trail, “What can I do, how do I volunteer to help here in Nepal?” People come to Nepal to trek but find they have a week left at the end of the trek and now, having seen this place, they feel they must do something before leaving.

To answer this question for many potential volunteers The Mountain Fund Volunteer Information Center is now under construction is in a very high traffic location near tourist center of Kathmandu. The center will be staffed daily by Mountain Fund staff who will be able to direct volunteers to one of the thirteen Nepali organizations we work with. We will have daily presentations by local nonprofit partners on volunteer opportunities in Nepal and provide Internet access for volunteers and supporters. We'll also have daily showings of the BBC documentary Carrying the Burden, an important film on porters.

As you can see in the artist rendering of the inside, the walls are a photo gallery of all the places and projects The Mountain Fund and our in-country partners are working. We'll also have brochures from all 13 in-country projects.

One of the truly remarkable features of The Mountain Fund Volunteer Visitor Center is vending service that will run by a former porter, Kul Bahadur. Kul's Coffee and Tea service is destined to become the Starbucks of Kathmandu. Kul's is a remarkable story of survival, loss and caring assistance. Kul became quite ill at 18,000ft while working as a porter in the Everest region. He was sent down alone and later found in a state of collapse and brought to the Pheriche Aid Post. He spent nine days in a coma, and had both feet partially amputated due to frostbite. As a result of this amputation, he is unable to return to portering.

With the generous support of several individuals and organizations like IMEC, Kul was able to pay off his medical bills. Additionally, was able to move his wife and daughters to Kathmandu, thus reuniting his family He had been unable to trek home to visit with them as a result of his amputation.

Kul's Coffee and Tea is the final step toward regaining the ability to work and support his family. Since he was no longer able to work as a porter Kul's ambition has been to save money and start his own small business to pay for his daughters education and support he and his wife. The Mountain Fund is creating that opportunity for Kul by setting him up in the coffee and tea vending business at our Visitor Center. We'll be helping Kul manage his money, learn basic bookkeeping and business principles so that he will be able to own and operate his own business.

If you'd like to help us and support the Volunteer Visitor Information Center and at the same time help Kul realize his dreams please visit our main website at www.mountainfund.org to make a donation.

To learn more about Kul, visit IMEC at http://www.hec.org/assisting/kulbahadur.htm

Mountain Fund Visits Taos Solar Fest

The Mountain Fund joined the Solar Village at the Taos Solar Fest this past weekend (6/24-6/25). Here is a photo of the Mountain Fund at work educating the masses, one person at a time, on issues affecting mountain peoples and their environments. We received a great response and a lot of enthusiasm for the work of the Mountain Fund and its programs.

The Taos Solar Fest is a great music and education event and if you didn't make it this year you should certainly plan to go next year. In addition to great performances by artists such as Spearhead, Ani Difranco, Peter Rowan, Steel Pulse and others there are booths with information and volunteers happy to tell you about solar, environmental, and humanitarian causes.

One last photo that I have to share with you is of a
bicycle locked up outside of the festival. I titled this photo Taos Bicycle: Old West Meets New West.

Economic Possibilities Part 2

Economic Possibilities for Our Times, by Jeffery D. Sachs
Jeff Sachs' groundbreaking book asserts that extreme poverty can be eliminated from the planet by the year 2015. In this, the second part of our three- part series we will discuss the specific goals of the Millennium Development Goals including examination of what we in the US agreed to do, and what we are doing.
The Millennium Development GoalsThe Global Compact to End Poverty

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger


2. Achieve universal primary education


3. Promote gender equality and empower women


4. Reduce child mortality


5. Improve maternal health


6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases


7. Ensure environmental sustainability


8. Develop a global partnership for development

To see the full MDGs click here.
For us in what Sachs' calls a "high-income" country, these needs are already 100 percent fulfilled even for the relatively poor. To meet these needs for the world's poor will require a decade or more of investment. But, let's pause there for a moment and get a handle on what sort of investment is required. The total amount needed to meet all eight goals sounds like a staggering number, $72 billion per year, until it is put into context. There are roughly 1.1 billion people living in extreme poverty, the type of poverty that kills. Each of those 1.1 billion people however, requires the modest sum of roughly $65.00 per year in aid for the MDGs to be realized. Spending $65 per person, per year doesn't seem like too large an investment to make in our fellow humans.
Do we have the resources to afford the MDGs? Yes, without question. Again the small and personal numbers help to keep a real perspective on the issue. Consider five developing countries - Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda. In order to scale up infrastructure and social services by the year 2015 to address the needs of those nations will require about $100 per person per year from 2005 to 2015. The rich world, the one we live in has an annual per capita income of nearly $27,000 per person plus government revenues of an additional $7000 per person per year for a total of $34, 000 per person per year. An investment of $100 is a small sum. For the poorest countries however, $100 per capita is a very large sum, equal to the income per capita of Ethiopia in 2001.
Has something on this scale been attempted before?Absolutely. At the end of WWII the Marshall Plan was implemented to re-build war devastated Europe. The United States, from 1948 through 1952 contributed more than 1% of our gross domestic product to support the Marshall Plan. That's around ten times the effort we are currently making toward the MDGs as a share of our GNP. Today we are giving 0.15 percent of GNP toward the MDGs. We pledged to give 0.7 percent and are short of our pledge by 0.55 percent of GNP. Our GNP rises about 1.9% per year, meaning that the amount we have pledged, but not contributed is less than one third of the annual increase in our GNP. Think of it this way, if the US were on track to reach the level of $40,000 per capita disposable income by January 1, 2010, making our promised contribution would delay that until May 1, 2010 or a third of a year. This four month lag would mean that a billion people would be given an economic future of hope, health and improvement rather than a downward spiral of disease, despair and decline. I think we could stand the four month wait, don't you?
Another approach to the math.In 2000 the IRS issued a report on the richest taxpayers. The top four hundred tax payers had a combined income of $69 billion dollars or roughly $174 million each. The income of just these 400 taxpayers exceeds the combined incomes of Botswana, Nigeria, Senegal and Uganda which is $57 million dollars. Consider the most recent three tax cuts we have been granted and the impact of those cuts which amounted to $220 billion dollars per year. The tax savings of the households above $500,000 per year in income amount to about $50 billion per year, enough to fund our share of the MDG needs.
Why we can't wait for the top 400 taxpayers.The preceding paragraph may have influenced you to believe that if "they", the richest people in our country, would just pay their fair share all would be well. We get too easily trapped in the idea that "they" is someone, but not us. The truth is that if you and I don't take action, no one is going to. Waiting for the richest four hundred people to fork over $50 billion could be a long, long wait. Small amounts from people like you and I can make a huge difference.
I recently read, for instance, that their are 1.6 million people who climb in North America alone. Sounds like an exaggeration but try to get a route on the Flatirons on a weekend and you'll start to believe it. I took a look at the budgets for the 32 programs that The Mountain Fund operates and determined that if every climber each sent us just twenty- five cents we could meet all of our goals for program support here at The Mountain Fund. Just a quarter each and 32 programs would be solid for one more year. So, you see what each of us can easily afford to do. I know there have been a lot of numbers in this article and I urge you to go back over these and allow them to fully sink in. Once you do, I think you will agree that the end of poverty is firmly within our grasp.
Get a copy of The End of Poverty at our online bookstore here . Join in this discussion at The Mountain Fund Blog here.
(This article consists of excerpts and commentary on writings from both The End of Poverty and from the December/January issue of Time Magazine.)

The End of Poverty

The End of Poverty

Economic Possibilities For Our Times, by Jeffery D. Sachs.

Jeff Sachs' groundbreaking book asserts that extreme poverty can be eliminated from the planet by the year 2015. In this, the first part of a three part series in which we will examine and discuss Sachs' claims, we will begin our search for the truth by examining what extreme poverty is and why some countries just can’t seem to escape the poverty trap.

Sach’s book separates fact from fiction about the causes and cures. For many of us the idea that poverty is a state that has always been with us and will always be with us is such a pervasively accepted truth, we do little to seriously attack the problem. Sachs shows us that we are surrounded in a fog of myth, half-truth and in some cases, outright misrepresentation. For example, former US Secretary Paul O’Neill said, “We’ve spent trillions of dollars on these problems and we have damn near nothing to show for it.” His remarks were specifically about aid for Africa. President Bush said in 2004 that as “...the greatest power on the face of the earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom. We have an obligation to feed the hungry.” US aid to farmers in poor countries to help them grow more food runs at about $200 million per year, or less then $1.00 per person per year for the hundreds of millions of people living in subsistence farming households.

Could it be that the investment we make, as large as $200 million sounds, until you compare that number to the real wealth of our country, is simply too small to make any difference? Worse still, do we know that what we are giving is too small to make any difference? Do we act as if it is enough then lament the outcomes, the damn near nothing to show for it sentiment? I’ll save you reading that part of the book and answer that yes, we know we aren’t giving enough to produce any real results, we absolutely know it. Let’s compare our spending policies for military and poverty for a moment. This year the US will spend nearly $500 billion (with a B) on the military. We will spend one-thirtieth of that or $16 billion, to address the plight of the poorest of the poor.

The poorest of the poor are living in countries whose societies are destabilized by extreme poverty, the types of societies that may become the breeding grounds for tomorrow’s terrorists. Can we hope to achieve lasting peace in the world when only 15¢ on every $100 dollars of our national income is spent to eliminate poverty around the planet? It’s a rhetorical question really and it gets worse. Our share devoted to help the poor has been in decline for decades and is a tiny fraction of what the US has repeatedly promised, and repeatedly failed to give.

As I sometimes do, I am getting ahead of things though. Let’s get back to defining the extreme poor before we move on in parts two and three to looking at the solutions in more detail. Nearly half the 6 billion people in the world are poor. That fact shocked me so much I had to re-read it a few times before I could really grasp the implications of it. As a matter of definition there are three degrees of poverty: extreme (or absolute) poverty, moderate poverty and relative poverty. Extreme poverty, defined by the World Bank as getting by on an income of less than $1 a day, means that households cannot meet basic needs for survival. They are chronically hungry, unable to get healthcare, lack safe drinking water and sanitation, cannot afford education for their children and perhaps lack rudimentary shelter – a roof to keep rain out of the hut – and basic articles of clothing, like shoes. Extreme poverty has been described as “the poverty that kills.”

Moderate poverty, defined as living on $1 to $2 a day, refers to conditions in which basic needs are met, but just barely. Relative poverty is defined by household income levels below a certain proportion of the national average and lacking in things that the middle class takes for granted.

Extreme poverty exists almost exclusively in the so-called developing world. The World Bank estimates there are 1.1 billion (with a B) people living in extreme poverty or about one-sixth of the world’s population. Where are these people? For the most part they live in either sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, particularly Southeast Asia or one of the world’s mountainous regions such as South America and Central Asia including much of the former Soviet Union.

Get a copy of The End of Poverty at our online bookstore here. Join in this discussion at The Mountain Fund Blog here.

(This article consists of excerpts and commentary on writings from both The End of Poverty and from the December/January issue of Time Magazine.)

What more in the name of love?

What more in the name of love.

Bono and the End of Poverty.

U2 singer Bono has been actively covered in the press lately, not for his latest CD, but for his stand on world poverty. Time magazine recently named Bono one of it' s "Persons of the Year" alongside Bill and Melinda Gates. The increased giving to human aid projects around the world has even come to be known as the "Bono Effect." So what is a rocker doing digging so deeply in the causes and cures of world poverty and does he have a message that we should all listen to? In the foreword to Jeff Sachs' groundbreaking new book The End of Poverty the rock-star turned humanitarian has these things to say about global poverty:

Hunger, disease, the waste of lives that is extreme poverty is an affront to all of us.

Fifteen thousand Africans dying each and every day of preventable, treatable diseases - AIDS, malaria, TB- for lack of drugs that we take for granted. This statistic alone makes a fool of the idea that many of us hold on to very tightly: the idea of equality.

Equality is a very big idea, connfreedom freedome, but an idea that doesn't come for free. If we're serious, we have to be prepared to pay the price. Some people will say we can't afford to do it. I think we can't afford not to do it.

We can be the generation that no longer accepts that an accident of latitude determines whether a child lives or dies. We can't say our generation didn't know how to do it. We can't say our generation couldn't afford to do it. And we can't say our generation didn't have reason to do it.

Bono knows what he is talking about. He has invested himself heavily in the crusade to end extreme poverty on the planet and knows it is within our reach to do so. That sounds perhaps like a pipe dream. Few of us have taken on the task of really imagining that extreme poverty could be eliminated on the planet and within our lifetime. Many of us have come to believe that extreme poverty is a persistent fact of life that will not go away no matter how much time and money is invested in its eradication.

In the next few newsletters, we'll examine more closely what can be done about extreme poverty and discuss Jeff Sachs' claim that we have it within our grasp to eliminate it by the year 2015.