Being audited

Kristine just completed two weeks of tending to visitors from the Office of the Auditor General of Norway. No less than five of them. Not only were they doing a performance audit of the Norwegian development assistance to Nepal. They had choosen education, which is my main responsibility, and one of 'my' NGOs. So needless to say that this has occupied a lot of my time lately. Of course we had to show them the real situation in schools and villages in other parts of the country as well. This time, the field visit went to Banke, Surkhet and Dang. Here are some pics:

http://picasaweb.google.com/lasse.storholt/FieldtripFeb2009

Getting to select UWC students from Nepal

After I came to Nepal I got in touch with my "3rd year", Dinesh. So nice to catch up on what has happened during the last 18 years (...!) and gossiping about our classmates etc. But it turns out he is the chairman of the National Committee for United World Colleges here as well. So while some people are still living close to the UWC in their endavours, the best that the rest of us can do is to try and keep in touch with a few of our friends from school. [Although, Facebook does help in that regard these days.] I therefore felt very privileged when I was asked to join the interviewing panel for this year's batch from Nepal who are competing for 6 scholarships. We did 50 interviews last Saturday. It was amazing to see the motivation, high hopes and already truly impressive accomplishments of pretty much all the kids who made it to this round. We brought the shortlist down to 15 and will have social interaction and debates etc in a couple of weeks to make the final selection. It's very exciting to be a part of it, and I am of course learning a lot about what 16 year olds in Nepal are concerned abouth these days. This experience has reminded me so well of all the great things about UWC and brought a lot of fantastic memories back. Also, meeting other UWC alumni in Kathmandu is of course great! Kristine

Christmas in norway

Finnaly we managed to write a few words.. We came back from a long Christmas vacation in Norway a few weeks ago, so I thought we could post some of the pictures. So many things has happened since the last blog post, so I'm not sure where to begin.

We were 5 weeks in Norway visiting friends and famil and we had lot's of fun. It was nice going back to Norway, but very cold.. :) , and dark..

Chrismas eve we spent at Kristine's parents, my parents and Hans was also there, the
25th we where at my parents with the same group of people pluss my sister and her family, and we had lot's of fun. Filip and Ada really enjoyed playing and just seeing their grandparents again, and ofcourse their cousins Thelma and Mina!

We met so many friends for the rest of the stay, so itæs impossible to mention everything, but one of the highlights was the trip to Trysil the last weekend with Caroline and family and Terjes brother and sister in law. Going skiiing again(alpine at least) was lot's of fun, and is something we miss down here.

I'll post some more pictures with a link soon.