TWO DAYS CAMPAIGN AGAINST CLIMATE CHANGE

With all excitement and motivation first day with fruitfulness began from Bhirkutimandap where bus was waiting for all 100 participants. While trying to be punctual i reached before arrival time given by GPS(Global Power Shifter)Nepal team. It was weird to wait for my friends in between more than 30 participants whom i had never met before. Oh! Finally they arrived after 15 minutes thank god. As we got signal that we were about to begin our trip to Nagarkot we were smart enough to step first on the bus.....no doubt that i reserved a corner window seat , a place where i feel good while travelling. Now this is where my story gets interesting. since we were 4 friends, one of my friend had to return to his home for a while due to some reason, but he would be back on his own in the training center, so we were three now, i had to sit alone on that seat ......after few minutes a girl came and asked me if anyone was seating by my side then i replied "no, you can seat".  Now we were on our destination, i wanted someone to talk because it had already been 15- 20 minutes. I was murmuring myself "girl by my side why doesn't she talk or ask any question?" Then i thought i should begin the conversation because i was really getting too bored.....i began "what is your name?" and the conversation went on ....till we reached our destination we found out that we were linked through many people , we had lot of common friends, close friends indeed! Wow!  Kathmandu is really a small place................

May be after one hour we reached CHRDU(Centre for Human Resource Development unit), place where our training or better i would call a campaign was about to be held. We were about 100 participants we were unknown to each other so the introduction round went in a very interesting way. Our one of the mentor had a nice way to introduce each other which consumed very less time.  We were separated into whooo and haaaaa team, i want to add something here.....WHOOO and HAAA when we were told to act so i could not resist myself laughing out loud i was like what is he doing???  But it was fun then, all the participants started expressing themselves out after WHooo and  HAAA ...... getting back to the introduction WHOO team had to face HAA team in a round circle so that we could easily talk and interact, as we introduced with one participants we had to move in clockwise direction so that we could get introduced to all of them.  It was fun though.

We were called to Sagarmatha hall for the rest of session. A very interesting session by our mentors which made us quiet serious about the topic "climate change ". Almost everyone were so into the topic "a Real POWERSHIFTERS".  Being an Environmental Science and Management Student i am well knowledged about CLIMATE CHANGE but at this session mentors inspired me i guess most of the participants to act upon it, to be a solution of a problem.......to THINK. ACT. SAVE. . Sometimes i wonder why we don't realize that we are killing our future generation before they are even born and destroying our future. As we were told not to sit with our known friends i sat in between two guys, those face were very new to me i started talking to my right side boy, he seemed to be very junior than me, but very knowledgeable. I was really pleased to see all the participants with the attitude and enthusiasm of changing themselves to change others attitude towards environment. There were basically five different themes and i guess at least two mentors for each theme, the themes were: Research and policy, Eco-friendly business, Eco-friendly behavior and alternative energy. We had to choose one of the themes and get committed to it for 2.5 months which will end in June 5(World Environment Day) with a graduation programme. Being a master's student i had chosen Research and Policy. Well after this interesting session finally we had lunch.....seemed all of them were very hungry.

Research and policy: the terms itself seems to be very complicated, that is why i guess we had least participants in the theme. We were given separate room for our discussion.  Our session began with introduction round with our mentors. Because we were only about 5 or 6 people from Environmental background, participants didn't have much knowledge about climate change. So, our mentors gave presentations on background, impacts, solutions, state of climate change in context of Nepal.  I would say i gained lot knowledge than i had before about climate change, depth knowledge. Sometimes i used to get distracted then observe everyone and think " well we research group are intellectual than others". Sometimes we heard Drama group cheering out loud but still we didn't change our decision and dedication towards Research.  Time and again one of our mentors came and freshen us up by different games and quiz. I wouldn't miss a chance to tell that i won one of the quizzes and i did very well in most of the games. Day first session was till 6 p.m., with an attitude with change we discussed and ended a session but we had to find out our research topic and present our action plan next day....Within research theme we were divided into 4 groups, we had to come up with two different topics from single group. After 6p.m. the entertainment started, someone was rapping, singing; someone even wrote a song for power shifter, Very creative people within 100 participants. One of the participants plugged in his mobile cable to the speaker and all participants started to dance. Then, we had our dinner, talked for a while with our friends and went to our room.....well i want to get back to story here, before our entertainment time we were paired with unknown participants as our roommate, i was paired with a girl, luckily she was in my own group, i was already very close to her during our session...because our mentors wanted us to interact with other than our friends.... But my mate wanted to stay with her friends and have a very good time, she requested me if i could exchange the room and i did and we were pretending as if we couldn't be with our friends the very next day while talking to our mentors.....this was a secret part which i am reveling here. I cannot sleep if light gets off, i was so unlucky that the lights of my room was not working, i could finally sleep around 1 a.m. disturbing my friend every 10 minutes.

Day 2 the plan was to wake up early and hike till Nagarkot tower to see sunrise, which was 6 km from the training center.....But when i woke up sun was shining over my face, it was 7 o' clock....most of the participants went for hike, we went to a near restaurant and explored the environment, we could see so many species of birds, they were very beautiful.... Everyone returned from hike, had breakfast and day 2 sessions began. We all gave a presentation and our action plan for 2.5 months on our research topic, our mentors really appreciated what we came out with. We didn't only want to do a research we want to bring change at the end of 2.5 months.  Since we had to choose a leader for each group, my group chose me as a leader........leader was given responsibility to keep updating mentors about the research. We ended up agreeing to meet every Tuesday with the commitment.  

Well session had to end with presentation from all the groups from different themes and their action plan. It started with Research and Policy group and ended up with Drama........... The ending part was very interesting one of our friend was in drama group, he was given a dialogue which he delivered " pani xaina pairo gayo kasari adapt garne"..... we audience were so catchy that within a second we catched the word "adapt" how would a village person know what is adapt?......well that was the point which made all of them laugh out loud. But the Drama was very informative which i think is the way to give information to huge mass of people in very short time in effective way.

With tea and popcorn our campaign ended with a perfect picture with all participants and left CHRDU.....i  couldn't resist having us sing  while getting back to very polluted Kathmandu.