During 2000, the main purpose of the Virtual Foundation Japan's assistance to the Buddha Darshan Club's thangka painting school was to help reopen the school which was first opened as an integral part of the "Muraokoshi" (village revitalization) project of the Kot-timal village of the Kavre district, east of Nepal. This goal has been more than met, and the school now is in full operation with a new student body with a team of highly qualified instructors. This project is destined to become a strong element of the village's on-going development program.

As a result, therefore, we at VFJ are prepared to engage in a much more forward-looking new project as we head into 2002. During this second stage of the project, we intend to install a satellite ground station terminal at the school to connect the village to a web site called "E-Bazaar," a meeting place for all equipped with a video-streaming news service.

This way, any one of us can meet with the young artists as they work on their elaborate thangkas paintings, making it possible for the Japanese and American urban dwellers to engage in person-to-person dialogues with the young Nepali artists using one's own language, English, Japanese or Nepali, thanks to the VFJ's e-mail translation services.

In addition to this, the VFJ is also developing a new ambitious project in collaboration with the Teachers without Borders of Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. under which the school children of both U.S. and Japan, of the ages ranging from elementary school to junior high school, to engage in cultural exchange activities with their Nepali counterparts.
The children of each country will prepare themselves to tell their respective stories about their countries' culture, local community life, and their own problems to be posted at the common Internet web site in three languages. From there, they all begin asking each other questions about everything in life they want to know, thus deepening each other's personal knowledge and understanding of cultures and life styles other than their own. While a Japanese and American parent may well end up purchasing the thangka paintings, the children might begin talking about sending some jogging shoes to their Nepali peers who want to try them for the first time in life. The important thing here is that all this will happen in a personal, face-to-face and interactive situation.

All the homes in the Kot-timar village in the depth of the Nepal Himalayas are without any utilities like gas, water or electric power which we all take for granted. However, thanks to the IT revolution, we are now able to provide them with Internet connectivity by the use of inexpensive communication satellite service, thanks to the assistance and cooperation of a number of national and international NGOs and private citizens in the past year. We have finally come to the stage where we can say we are in discussion with a number of elementary and junior high schools both in the U.S. and Japan as to the best way of organizing and starting the stage one of this international project.
Those who are interested in find more about this project should contact the following e-mail address.

E-Mail: Japan-U.S.-Nepal Committee for the Promotion of the Children's Own Cultural Exchange
Tel: 042-381-7688
Fax; 042-381-7692

The Virtual Foundation Japan Chairman of the Board Yutaka Okamoto