Dear sponsors, Namaste!

We are delighted to give you fresh news about our project in Nepal. In our last letter, we briefly told you the history of Nepal and presented the various obstacles in our "Protection and reinsertion of street children in Kathmandu " program. We hope this time to talk to you about a particular thematic that we tackled to include in our project: drug addicted street children.

Here in Kathmandu, it's tourist season. Despite an extremely unstable political situation, visitors continue to come back to the "country of the gods". We've been seeing notable a lot of French travellers this year, probably because the French Department of Foreign Affairs were less alarmist than other governments.

All sorts of tourists touch elbows with Nepal, from the athletic hiker wearing the latest gore-tex shoes to the "néo-baba" all dressed in purple and letting a heady patchouli fragrance float behind them while passing by lovers of Hindu or Buddhist culture lingering around temples.

The return of tourists, who have abandoned Nepal due to serious political troubles in the last two years, certainly brings happiness to street children who have been reduced for months to collecting and selling old plastic found on the streets.

The street children can solicit tourists and try to sell them their drawings, offer to guide them through the old town, or simply beg to them.

Unfortunately, these propositions are not always so innocent. Selling drugs - hard or soft - to tourists remains much more "profitable" without talking of the sale himself. And one or the other leads more and more frequently to drug addiction, a new calamity with street children.