January 25, 2007	Thursday	Muharram 05, 1428

Putalibazar (Nepal): It’s often said that travellers visit Nepal because of the mountains but return because of the people. The generosity of the Nepalese goes straight to the heart and inspires reciprocation.

I found that in November when I visited a library in Putalibazar, a town about 30 miles south of Pokhara. The staff draped three chains of marigolds around my neck and gave me a blessing, or tika, in the form of a puff of red powder on my face. Later that day I went walking along Pokhara Lake in the foothills of the Annapurnas. People kept smiling at me and asking if I’d had a good day.

But visitors can’t fail to notice poverty and disadvantage in a country hobbled by political instability and corruption, the Hindu caste system and inadequate education. The arrival of democracy and such organisations as the US Peace Corps more than four decades ago brought hope and a degree of change. But, for a tangled web of reasons, much of the foreign aid has not gotten where it was meant to go and democracy foundered, leaving the Nepalese without many of the rights and services Americans take for granted.

There are, for example, few public libraries in Nepal. The lack of books, especially in remote villages, struck tour operator Toni Neubauer, president of Nevada-based Myths and Mountains, during her visits to Nepal. She began addressing the problem two decades ago by starting Rural Education and Development, or READ, a nonprofit organisation that helps Nepalese communities build and equip libraries.

“You cannot travel in places where people’s lives are very different from your own without wanting to do something about it,” Neubauer said. After trekking in Nepal, former Microsoft marketing director John Wood started Room to Read, which promotes literacy in half a dozen Asian countries and South Africa. Wood’s recent book Leaving Microsoft to Change the World tells a story similar to Neubauer’s about the heart-opening effects of foreign travel.

My trip included visits to several READ libraries, accompanied by Sharad Babu Shrestha, the organisation’s executive director in Nepal. He grew up in the mountainous Gorkha district, then went to college in Katmandu. His father didn’t learn to read until he was 18, but his daughter, Suveksha, now seven, mastered The Cat in the Hat at age three.

People have no reading habit, he told me. Public schools opened a scant 50 years ago. Parents must pay for books and uniforms as well as schoolroom construction and teacher salaries, in some cases. And many children are forced to quit school to help support their families.—Dawn/The Los Angeles Times News Service