A New Home!
Pictured is our fantastic new home, with its bold colours creating strong contrasts to help the partially sighted find their way around. The building process was not without its frustrations but (thankfully) it did not go over budget and took just five months (two of which were in the monsoon!) to complete. The students are delighted with it and for the first time can really visualise their futures as masseurs. Having a permanent base for the project has made a huge difference and means that now we can finally start rounding up some willing tourists for the students to practise on!

One treatment room (pictured) is complete with an attached (hot!) shower and we are working on the furnishing the office/reception now with information posters and the suchlike. Next on the list is the signage but because our budget is limited, some things will simply have to wait – like our planned sensory garden with vegetable plots. We’ve got a few token spinach plants and cauliflowers in but it’s the wrong time of year for growing here really. (Only mad Englishmen start gardening in the middle of winter!) Still, we’ve very excited about planting all sorts of wonderful things in future such as guava, papaya, orange and banana trees!

HUGE thanks must go to our diligent volunteer project manager Kul Bahadur Acharya, who gave up five months of his life to coordinate the construction (instead of employing a contractor) and in doing so saved us well over a thousand pounds.

Training Progress
The students have sailed through the second unit of their theory training (there are four units in total). The anatomy aspects are quite technical but their memories are astoundingly good and they can already recite the names and positions of the majority of the bones, muscles and organs. Laxman and Sarita are still showing excellent natural talent for massage and all are helped by our best English-speaker, Chiran, who is a star pupil, if a little over-enthusiastic when it comes to inventing new massage techniques!