In April, two young Dutch psychology students, Irene and Inger, arrived with great ambitions to help Umbrella. No one could have told us then what these girls were capable of when they put their minds to it. What they have achieved in such a short time has our heads still spinning!

Earlier this year Umbrella lost our child counsellor so when the girls realised that we were need of help designing a counselling programme within Umbrella they went above and beyond the call!

The girls designed a programme, detailing how it should run, a detailed budget and instructions on the type of counsellor we should look for. They didn’t stop there…

They then began fundraising form friends and family at home for this particular project and in a short space of time they had raised enough money to run the counselling centre for an entire year.

That still wasn’t the finishing line for these girls. They then placed adds in the Kathmandu newspapers, recruited and interviewed  with Stephen, hired Umbrella’s new counsellor.

You might think that they’d stop there but again you’d be wrong. They then found premises for the counselling centre, they decorated it furnished it and decked it out with all the trimmings that you might expect to see in any Dutch counselling centre!

The centre was named ‘Paraplu’ which is Dutch for Umbrella. A Buddhist Puja ceremony was held as the official opening and blessing of the house.