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My rain team and me

When Pratap Maharjan asked my interest to work on the project of exhibiting the posters on rainwater harvesting I cautiously replied, “it’s not a one man showso I will tell you after consulting my team’.

Today, we have successfully accomplished the exhibition at four places, Nepal Art Council Gallery, BabarMahal on 22nd March; National Academy of Science and Technology (NAST), Khumaltaar-Lalitpur on 24th March;National Trust for Nature Conservation (NTNC),Khumaltaar-Lalitpur on 28th March and finally at Joint Sector Review WASH conference on 31stMarch on the occasion of World Water Week.

The posters came from the competition held at globallevel, which was organized by International Rainwater Harvesting Alliance (IRHA), Geneva, Switzerland in the late 2013. The exhibitions received appreciation from visitors in Kathmandu.

A group of 7 students pursuing B.Sc. Environmental Management at SchEMS, got the firsthand team experience with the project. Though we were amateur in organizing such event, it exposedour creativity in poster display and its effective messaging. With minimum resources available we were able to reach out more and get positive feedbacks. Learning happened spontaneously. Showing the courage to take up the project in such a small budget, now I ask myself, “Were we crazy?”  The amount we got for the two consecutive events happened to be more than triple the budget we had initially calculated. Thanks to the sponsors. The courage came up because we did not see things through thus it did not limit our capacity. The problems resolved as we moved along.

I appreciate my team for their dedication and commitment. With an attitude of ‘no matter what’ we were able to disseminate the public about the importance to adapt rainwater harvesting to overcome the scarcity. During the exhibition at NAST, Manoj Thakur, senior scientist at National Agriculture Research Center (NARC) said,” In a five years time I am seeing a serious scarcity of water. This awareness campaign should be done in an aggressive scale.” He added that poster is a good medium to shoot out the message loud to the audiencesas pictures speak by themselves.

Most important of all, this event paid me off as a good learning platform in coordination. I believe each of my every teammembers have their own experiences to share. Moving alone steadily makes a lot of difference. Therefore, to have such a good team to work with is what I am gratified.

By Raj Prasai

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