More meetings
Meetings, meetings and more meetings. We’ve had a busy week, meeting with DWO, last week, and then the Tranquility School, and through them, a spa designing/spa concept company also met with us.
DWO has had many inquiries from their radio program and tv programs. All the inquiries have been male, however, our advisor, Don (he manages all the 2 of the major spas in Nepal and owns a couple in Malaysia) recommended that we train more women, since his colleagues in resort destinations have asked for female therapists. Unfortunately, massage is associated with prostitution.
First we cannot call it “massage therapy” here in Nepal, we call it natural healing therapy, and we also asked DWO to stress that it is a beautician school with natural healing techniques such as ayurveda, foot reflexology, facial and Reiki. These things are well knows in Nepal. I joked with the Hem and Bhuwan (Tranquility School owners) that we have to acclimate our female students to massage by start with the fingernails and work our way through the body.
The male inquiries have a lot of questions concerning exactly what we are teaching, they also question “massage.” DWO said that the inquiries are excited about the school, since it is a different type of training for a NGO to offer. They also don’t understand healing, so they were asking the people at DWO what it means. Part of our application is an essay about what it means to be a healer and why they are called to this profession.
So, we’ll see how it goes with DWO, I was supposed to put on my blog the requirements for students. And which obviously I didn’t do. I only have the admission criteria written in Nepali with English phonetics (English letters). And I thought maybe some people will not be able to fully understand if it’s written in Nepali phonetics.
As for this A.W. Lake company, they create unique concepts for top hotels in the world, and she wanted to find signature treatments indegenious to Nepal to sell her clients. Her point person contacted the Tranquility school and they told her about us.
So we met with her, and after a few meetings, thinking it might be a good fit, we realize that it’ll take away from our work, if we are researching, testing and inventing new treatments for her, it could distract us from the project. We haven’t told her yet, she already left Nepal.
I saw it as another credible avenue to give jobs to students. She wanted us to train them in our program, along with any specialized treatment that we develop with her.
So that was interesting.
Also, I wasn’t convinced that Tranquility understood our relationship to them. That we are contracting them to train our students, not that we are opening a school with them. It seemed like they thought it would be a permanent arrangement.
The deal is, if I haven’t explained already, is that Tranquility School, trains therapists to work in spas. Both are experienced therapists, that have worked in all the spas in Nepal–Hyatt, Fulbari, Le Meridien. These are 5-star spas in their respective hotels. They teach ayurvedic massage, sirodhara, accupressure, swedish, along with beautician techniques, and hydrotherapy. Just a quick description.
We were going to hire them until we get our own building, since they have the facilities, and staff in place why not hire them?
It just felt like everytime we met with them, that they think this was a long-term arrangement. It might be it might not be, right now they aren’t very busy, they don’t have any students to train, and they have some clientele, we might just end up hiring them, and they run their school separate from us, to give them some income.
So, we still have to hire yoga/meditation teachers and anatomy/physiology teachers. Raise money for 10 students, and get it underway.
Tags: Kathmandu Work
Administrator
Leave a Reply