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History of the Institute for Himalayan Conservation-Nepal
The Institute for Himalayan Conservation-Nepal was born as an international effort for conservation and self-sustenance of Nepali village life. The program formally began in 1974 after Dr. Kawakita Jiro, from Japan, spent six months in Sikha valley, Myagdi district of Nepal in mid 1960s.
Capacity Building
The IHC-N's major goal is to nurture creativity, and self-reliance for community development. It does this work by involving local people in projects of local relevance. To do this, it provides a variety of training opportunities to local people in different fields. Some examples are:-
- We have provided basic and advanced health care training to some of the the village womens in health care methods.
- We have provided computer, accounting, and proposal/report writing trainings to the villager who are in resposible position. The purpose of these trainings are to make the villagers able to write proposals, do reporting, keep accounting of the village projects, and make use of the computer. IHC-Nepal plans to provide one computer to each of the villages in future.
- We are providing on the job training to two new nurserymen so that they can replace the older nurserymen upon their retirement.
- We are going to provide some basic technical training to some of the people from the village so that they can do technical works such as surveying, estimation and construction of small civil projects by themselves.
- We are also planninng to provide Japanese language course to a couple of people to facilitate communication between Nepali and Japanese members of the institute.
Culture Conservation
The IHC-N's efforts towards culture conservation consists of publishing collection of folktales, recording traditional music and dances, and making videos about the culture and lifestyle of the villagers of Myagdi and Lower Mustang district. It publishes folktale books in both the English and Nepali languages. The IHC-N's "Culture Conservation Committee" presently manages efforts at cultural preservation and recording.
IHC-N also plans to work with the Himalayan Amchi (Tibetan traditional medicine doctors) Association of Nepal to conduct research on local herbs that grow both in higher and lower altitude of Sikha valley area of Myagdi. Amchi (Dr.) Tsampa Nwang Gurung, the chairman of the Himalayan Amchi Association, and also the board member of the IHC-Nepal has assured for his help to lead the research team. We are plann
ing to conduct this research in 2002. The purpose of the research is to explain and clarify the importance of traditional Tibetan medicine. After the research is complete, we will publish the report in a book the following year.
Income generation
In order to help raise their standard of living, IHC-Nepal encourages villagers to generate cash income through different income generating programs. However, IHC-Nepal has not been able to help much in this area. One of the projects the IHC-Nepal helping is cheese making from cow milk, which has been started in Paudwar village. With the financial support of IHC-Japan, Paudwar High School has started making cheese from May, 2001.
The next promising projects that IHC-Nepal is planning to support is to help villagers start fruit processing such as pickles, Jelly, Jam from produce that grows in the area.
Still another project of the IHC-Nepal is to encourage people living at lower elevations to grow oranges, lemons and others citrus fruit. For this, IHC-Nepal has started an experimental program of producing orange, and lemon sapling for distribution in Aulo Community Forest Nursery from 2001. To broaden and supplement the citrus growing program, IHC-Nepal plans to educate local people about vegetable and other cash crop farming in the area where they plant the fruit trees.