Namaste, Friends and Supporters of dZi,

As we enter into our 5th year of partnering with the Himalayan Dental Relief Project (HDRP), I thought it might be a good time to reflect on what has been accomplished to date.

Since 2003, dZi and HDRP have hosted 16 dental camps reaching 8,192 patients. This translates into: 6,856 fillings, 1,855 extractions and 1,375 cleanings. In addition, during each visit, the children receive toothbrushes, brushing instruction and hygiene training to build strong oral health habits. Many of these children have now completed their second-and in some cases third-follow up visits, and show remarkable improvement in overall oral health.

It is amazing what it takes to organize and execute these two, one-week clinics, in Leh, Ladakh and Kathmandu, Nepal (two times per year); it requires a passion and dedication of many staff, volunteers, and local support. We also coordinate a remote clinic, outside of Ladakh, that involves packing up an abbreviated list of dental equipment and traveling over a mountain pass at 17,000 feet. The children served at this clinic, are mostly from nomadic Shepard families who tend to their prized Pashmina sheep. Many have never had any type of dental care.

It is not uncommon for one of our patients to have been in "pain" for some time (some for over a year), and discover that they have an abscessed tooth causing a full-body infection. It's difficult to imagine how a child could suffer for so long with such extreme discomfort. However, one of the most rewarding aspects of these clinics, is being able to treat our patients by extracting the problem tooth (often times providing immediate relief), and then medicate the infection, get it under control, and, ultimately, bring the child back to good health.

The work is not easy, and the hours are long-you pretty much collapse into bed every night. The rewards are worth it, though. I truly appreciate our partnership with HDRP: a collaboration of two Colorado Non-Profits coming together to serve the children of Nepal and Ladakh.

Wish List

I would like to upgrade our in-the-field medical equipment for staff and volunteers. I will be building five Advance First Aid Kits. If this is something that you would like to support, there are two options: support 1 Kit for $300, or all of them for $1,500.

All the best.

Jim Nowak
Executive Director

The dZi Foundation Welcomes Our New Guardian Angels - Garry Schalla

Guardian Angel - A spirit that is believed to watch over and protect a person or place.

On behalf of the dZi Foundation, I am delighted to welcome Ground Floor Media-a public relations firm in Denver, CO- as the "Guardian Angels" of the Happiness Home in Sikkim, India. The Happiness Home provides a safe, stable home environment to twenty-one young women-all from extremely difficult backgrounds involving homelessness, slavery, abuse, and/or prostitution.

Each Happiness Home resident is already sponsored by individual donors to help cover medical, nutritional and daily expenses. However, in order for these young women to fully develop into mature, happy, productive women, they need more. Enter: The Ground Floor Media "Guardian Angels".

The Guardian Angels Fund will provide those "little extras" girls and young women need to grow, expand and feel "special": art supplies, musical experiences, movies, clothing for special occasions and events, field trips and cultural events. These are the essentials of life experiences to help round out these young lives.

Nepal Country Office Hosts Revitalize A Village Trainings - Ben Ayers

The dZi Foundation Nepal Country Office hosted a pair of comprehensive trainings for our new Revitalize A Village Initiative in Eastern Nepal; 120 local residents were in attendance.

The first training session was in partnership with World Education. It taught community members and local schoolteachers the fundamentals of forming and managing Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs), along with implementing in-house teacher training programs. The second training session lasted four full days, and helped the members of our Community Development Groups improve their proposal writing, project management and organizational skills.

Photo at right is of staff members Laxman, Prema Tamang and Ang Chokpa.

The rural schools in our Revitalize A Village target area are among the lowest performing schools in Nepal, and face a host of challenges ranging from teacher absenteeism to dilapidated school buildings. Schools rarely have sufficient teachers, classrooms, and materials, and many children are kept out of school to work in the family fields, as child porters, or as domestic servants. We have found that PTAs can bring about a dramatic change in the community.

The PTA training session is the third one we have given, and it will allow us to accomplish our goal of supporting a total of 43 PTAs across six VDCs (roughly the equivalent of a county); it had 64 participants. In addition to spelling out the nuts and bolts of community school management, we emphasized the importance of children's rights, alternatives to corporal punishment, and focused extensively on strategies to help local schools raise their own funds from local sources. [We are currently seeking funding to implement a matching grants program for each of our 43 PTAs. We will provide seed money for local fundraising programs that will ensure a steady stream of income to support the needs of each school for years to come.]

The four-day training session included 56 members from our Community Development Groups. The trainings focused on helping our community groups improve their organizational management and effectiveness when designing and proposing new projects. The training was very well received, and we are now encouraging our Community Development Groups to register as official Non-Governmental Organizations before we distribute our next round of grants for infrastructure projects in the spring.