While much of my time recently has been spent making visits to COCAP member organizations, as of this weekend I had only met with four out of our eleven regional members. This changed quickly on Monday and Tuesday when representatives from all eleven members joined in a regional meeting here in Nepalgunj.

To assemble all the groups is no small feat. One member from Jajarkot District in the hills does not have any roads going to his town. It is a full two days hike through the hills to get to the closest bus stop followed by more than 10 hours on winding mountain roads. Despite the difficulties all of the members made the trip and gave Krishna and I two full days time to conduct a meeting to discuss strengthening COCAP and coordinating collective action.

Participants slept and ate at a hotel in Nepalgunj which was next to a small training center used by local NGOs. I made my way over to the hotel at 8am each day and joined everyone for breakfast. By 8:30 or 9 we all assembled at the training center to discuss the topics of the day. I think my meeting plan was greatly influenced by both my time watching the SAC’SWEET Training and my years teaching. We did warm up activities and brain storming exercises similar to those I used to use in my classroom.

On the first day our focus was how to improve communications and strengthen the COCAP network regionally. We came up with a lot of good ideas like a regional newsletter and the creation of a more useful resource center. I was happy to see that people seemed excited to improve communications and generally seemed enthusiastic about COCAP in general. On the end of the second day we discussed regional problems and their causes and effects. We ended up with a list of eight that seemed the most important to us. The eight were human rights, social inclusion, women’s rights, income generation, low education levels, peace building, lack of knowledge about the elections and conflict victim rehabilitation. To end the first day of meetings we took a vote and decided that the two issues we thought we should take collective action on were social inclusion and peace building.

After the concluding the official meeting we headed back to the hotel. I had planned to stay for a few minutes in order to prepare for the next day. I ended up staying until 10 pm. At first I was just talking with Krishna and getting his personal views, but I ended up visiting most of the participants in their hotel rooms and getting honest and personal opinions about problems facing Nepal. Once I had spent a couple hours there I was hooked into staying for chicken and beer with some of the guys from the SAC Nepal office. It was a fun end to a productive and important day for my summer.