This is a 2014 academic journal article outlining the work of a group of volunteer Canadian counsellors who educated and collaborated with counsellors at Nepal House. In summary:

In working with our Nepali colleagues, we are aware that our counselling and supervision practices are embedded in Western values. This calls us to diligently strive toward developing an equitable partnership that does not contribute or maintain any systems of oppression (e.g., privileging our practices, language or materials).

We promote our colleagues’ right to know what we do, why we do it, and how we do it, so that they can create their own culturally appropriate interventions for the children with their current local knowledge of healing, ritual, and therapeutic practices including any ceremonies, traditions, rituals, initiations, traditional art, dance, song, stories, or symbols that are part of a Nepali way of life.

Keats, P. A. & Sharma, A. (2014). Canadian and Nepali counsellors: In collaboration for social justice in Nepal. Canadian Journal of Counselling, 48(3), 284–299.

Many children who have experienced trauma are unable to stay calm and focus on learning. In 2013, Dr. Alissa Antle, designer and builder of interactive technologies, designed a brain-computer interface called Mind-Full for the children of Nepal House. It is a modern take on the ancient practice of meditation using neurofeedback.

With an interactive tablet and an EEG headset, Nepal House children played a series of culturally appropriate games that teach self-regulation. This included an exercise with paragliding, which is a very common sight in Nepal.

Results from a 14-week trial showed that the children were able to transfer self-regulation skills into the classroom and playground and the effects were maintained for at least two months.

Based on these successful outcomes, more versions of Mind-Full were built for various environments and are now available in the Google Play store.

For more info, please see the TED talk on this subject.

Antle, A.N., Chesick, L., Levisohn, A., Sridharan, S.K., and Tan P. (2015). Using neurofeedback to teach self-regulation to children living in poverty. In Proceedings of Conference on Interaction Design for Children (IDC ’15), ACM Press (Medford, MA, USA, June 21-24), 119-128.

Vicki Hannam, a frequent volunteer at NHK, and her colleagues wanted to find out if the therapeutic practice of “body mapping” is appropriate for clients in Nepal. Body mapping is a means of storytelling, where individuals create maps of their bodies using drawing, painting or other art-based techniques to visually represent aspects of their lives and their bodies. It is a tool that can assist healthcare providers to have difficult conversations around taboo subjects with their clients.

In offering a body mapping workshop at Nepal House, she found that its tenets appeared to be understood and culturally applicable. In the journal article she and her colleagues later published, she highlighted the importance of differences in ‘meanings’ when coming from culturally different backgrounds and to be conscious of how we listen and interpret others’ narrative experiences.

Vicki Hannam, Rosie Gilliver, Nathaniel Casella, and Lucy Paveley published an article on this topic in the Australian Association of Social Workers magazine called Social Work Focus (Summer/Autumn 2020, volume 5, Issue 1, pages 25-27).