http://www.svsu.edu/clubs/vanguard/stories/1279 Please read last paragraph. I believe that is true. Nepal government gets lot of aid from EU, Japan but very little from USA. They can spend billions of dollars in war in Iraq because they can get oil from there while they dont care much about other poor countries like Nepal where they can not get any benefit from their natural resources. by Marisa Gwidt Vanguard News Editor March 26, 2007 — by Christina Dillbeck Adjunct political science professor Jim Johnson flew to Nepal over spring break to observe the civil war that has engulfed the nation.The country of Nepal is currently in the midst of a brutal civil war in which a reported 13,000 individuals have already died. So, naturally, SVSU adjunct political science professor Jim Johnson decided to hop on a plane and spend spring break observing the politics and geography of the South Asian nation. The Nepali king's publicly ostracized powers were relinquished last year, and an interim and factionalized legislature was appointed following a November peace agreement aimed at ending the conflict and determining the future of the constitutional monarchy. The current legislature consists mainly of Maoists, Marxist-Leninists, and members of the Nepalese Congress. Official elections are currently scheduled for mid-June, but if they do not go forward the country will likely go entirely back to war. Smaller parties are already pulling out of the legislature and calling on their members to return to guerilla tactics. "These people need a sense of peace," Johnson said, after adding he is not optimistic about elections occurring as soon as June. "It's been an 11-year war that has had a horrible set of consequences on the populace." Johnson flew into Kathmandu - Nepal's capital and home to the only major international airport in the country. Prior to traveling abroad, he arranged for a Nepalese political science student to work as his personal translator. In a malaria-ridden and water-deficient country where most of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, Johnson soon discovered that $35 a day was more than enough to keep the young university student continually converting Nepalese into English. "Pushkar came to me on the second day with tears in his eyes and asked, 'Do you know how much money this is?'" Johnson recalls. "He said, 'What you'll pay me in one week is enough to pay for all of my tuition for one year, and still have enough leftover to pay my father's salary for six months." Johnson and Pushkar traveled north from Kathmandu to the Tibetan border and the base of the Himalayas. In a country the approximate size of Arkansas, they went from a tropical jungle atmosphere with elephants, tigers and rhinoceros, to the foot of Mount Everest in just a day's drive. A main goal of Johnson's journey was to get a firsthand account of the country's United Nations-monitored Maoist camps. As a provision of the November peace agreement, approximately 30,000 members of the revolutionary peasant regime have been lodged in camps so that the UN can register and verify the fighters and their arms. However, Johnson was surprised to discover a lack of UN supervision in the Maoist camps. "It's ridiculous," he said. "The UN seems to be holed up in resort hotels conducting team-building exercises or something. They were just nowhere to be found." Without increased foreign assistance to Nepal, Johnson believes the country cannot effectively follow through with its plan to advance economically and democratically. He says the U.S. in particular is currently lacking in any form of support to Nepal because the Nepalese do not have anything Americans want. "If we discovered oil reserves under Kathmandu tomorrow," he explains, "I guarantee that within six weeks the Nepalese people would be wearing 20-gallon hats and riding horses. We'd be there in a big way."