Poor Kathmandu

Kathmandu is a wonderful place to visit, but when you wander around in the city you meet a lot of poor people; beggars, street vendors, holy men, and a lot of others. How do these people get by? Can they afford to send their children to school? Where do they live? How is their family life? These and a lot of other questions the author posed himself after visiting Kathmandu many times, and he decided to find the answers. He spend a long time in Kathmandu only to ask the poor themselves, take their pictures, and sometimes visit their homes. This book does not intend to answer the maybe most important question; how do we change the situation of poverty in Kathmandu and even more importantly, the rest of Nepal. The book can only be regarded as a personal experienced situation report, but it gives an insight into the situation and into the lives of a few people living in extreme poverty. The author is a writer, photographer and mountaineer who has visited Nepal many times, often to climb, but he has a personal liking to the poor people of Kathmandu.

The author of this book, Bo Belvedere Christensen, has visited Kathmandu and Nepal in general more than 20 times. Usually, he comes on expeditions to climb mountains, but through time he has come to know a lot of people especially from the Capital. Many of these are poor people, some of whom live in the streets of Kathmandu. During a longer than normal stay in Kathmandu Bo decided to start writing a book about these poor people and went around the town together with a Nepalese interpreter as many of the poor doesn't speek anything else but their own tongue. With his camera he spent weeks photodocumenting the lives of the poor and finally he finished this book. Bo has written 14 books about mountaineering mostly in danish. His first book about an expedition to Ama Dablam was published in 1988 by the biggest danish publisher Gyldendal. Bo has followed his passion and is now a full time professional mountaineer, guiding, leading expeditions, lecturing, documenting in photography and writing his mountaineering. He is well on the way with his most ambitious project so far, climbing the 14 fourteen peaks in The World above 8000 meter.