HEAR Nepal Deutschland, e.V.
The German association HEAR Nepal Deutschland e.V. was founded in 2018 by Sten and Karin Linnander to support the work of HEAR Nepal Kathmandu.
Sten Linnander
Sten Linnander is Swedish and spent four years as a boy growing up in Nepal, where his father worked as a legal advisor to the government. His mother worked as a teacher and organized aid programs for Tibetan refugees. He later received a Bachelor of Science in Physics and Geophysics from Stockholm University.
During the 1980s he organized a series of seminars and workshops within the framework of a social experiment in Germany, organizing visits by internationally acknowledged researchers and innovators from the social, scientific, and spiritual areas.
In 1990 he founded and headed a German association which carried out aid programs for the people in the former USSR. He brings the expertise he learned there into his work for HEAR Nepal. For the last 20 years he has worked as a translator and author.
Sten about his personal motivation for the work with HEAR Nepal
“In 2016 I decided to spend three months in Kathmandu to regain the feeling of beauty and magic that I had experienced there during my childhood. On the third day of my visit, in the middle of the bustle of Kathmandu I heard a voice behind me: “Namaste, Sir.” It was a man whom I did not know, Madhav Joshi, lab technician, political scientist and founder of HEAR Nepal. He told me of his dream of carrying out effective aid projects in the disadvantaged rural areas of Nepal, and he asked me for support. I couldn’t say no.
During the early 1960s, I had seen how difficult life in rural Nepal was. Now, more than 55 years later, I saw that in spite of billions of dollars that had poured into the country, little had changed. I felt that there were two prerequisites that had to be fulfilled if we wanted to achieve anything: First, we must be 100% sure that the projects that we plan are truly desired by the people, and that they are feasible. Second, the projects must right from the beginning be designed to be sustainable, also financially. I now travel twice a year to Kathmandu and Nepal to accompany our projects and ensure that these prerequisites are fulfilled.”
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Karin Linnander
Karin Linnander has worked in Frankfurt, Germany, as a psychologist (MA, Prescott College, Arizona) since 2003 in a practice of her own. She offers personal development seminars as well as rites of passage programs and family constellation courses.
For more than 15 years, her main focus was on working with adolescent girls. Karin’s passion is to empower them in their transition to womanhood. She has therefore prepared many groups of girls for their first menstruation and their first sexual experiences in schools and other public institutions.
At HEAR Nepal her main focus remains on girls and women. She therefore supports the project to promote the dignity and health of Nepalese girls and women.
Karin about her personal motivation for her work with HEAR Nepal
“During a trip to Bajhang I could see the difficult circumstances under which girls and women grow up and live in this remote region of far western Nepal. Until then, for me Nepal consisted mainly of Buddhist prayer flags, temples, monasteries, the spectacular beauty of the Himalaya mountains and the warmth and authenticity of the people. I was not aware that 80% of the population is Hindu and how dominant the caste system and the patriarchal traditions are, especially for girls and women.
I therefore decided to contribute to effecting change and took on responsibility for HEAR Nepal’s girls’ and women’s project. I thereby make good use of my professional experience and I often visit Nepal/Bajhang to accompany the project on location. I am very glad to be able to do something for the girls and women of Nepal who need it the most and thereby to give something back to life.”
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Anke Lesinski-Schiedat, medical adviser
Prof. Dr. Anke Lesinski-Schiedat, MD, is an ENT specialist and a senior physician at the ENT Clinic of the Hannover Medical University as well as the medical director of the German Hearing Center. Her focus is on providing hearing-impaired people with both operative and conservative hearing aids. Her clinical work is supplemented by research within the same main topic. Since 2017 she has been systematically active establishing a structure for hearing diagnostics and providing hearing aids for the hearing-impaired in Tanzania.
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HEAR Nepal
HEAR Nepal (HEAR stands for Health, Education, Awareness and Rights) is a Nepalese non-profit organization, registered in Kathmandu. It was founded in 2005 by the lab technician Madhav Prasad Joshi, who also holds an MA in Political Science. HEAR Nepal is staffed entirely by Nepalese citizens. Since its founding, HEAR Nepal has carried out a number of projects in the areas of health, education and environmental protection.
Among other things, HEAR Nepal conducted health checkups in more than 700 schools in the Kathmandu Valley and beyond for more than 10 years.
The HEAR Nepal Team:
Madhav Prasad Joshi, Project Manager
Lab technician with an M.A. in political science. He worked for four years in the District Hospital of Bajhang and two years for Save the Children, focusing on HIV testing. He spent five years as coordinator of health testing in schools in Kathmandu and the surrounding rural areas.
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Dr. Lakshmi Raj Joshi, Medical advisor
Dr. Joshi holds a PhD in Reproductive Health and an MA in Public Health. For over 35 years, he has worked with public health issues at the Ministry of Health and Population at the local, regional and national levels.
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Dr. Narbada Thapa, Advisor for epidemiology and public health
Dr.Narbada holds a PhD in Epidemiology and is a retired Brigadier General with 30 years‘ experience in the health care sector, health education, social medicine, nursing education, epidemiology and crisis management. She is currently the Vice Principal of the Institute of Crisis Management Studies, Kathmandu.