12/09/2026
"Slow mind."
It is the sentence we hear most often when a child's marks fall — from a teacher, sometimes from the family. It is not a reason. It is the place where the search for one stopped.
In Nepal, 13 out of every 100 children between 5 and 17 have at least one functional difficulty: seeing, hearing, walking, remembering, learning. A third of them have foundational reading skills. Of the other children, two thirds do. In primary school the gap is almost nothing. It opens at the top — half of them reach upper secondary, against three quarters of the others. Two in five children under five are anaemic, and about a third of adolescents; among our own children we see more than that.
So when one of our children is failing, we look at five things at once and never at only one. The eyes and the ears. The body, and what is on the plate. How the child learns — a learning difference such as dyslexia, trouble holding attention, a developmental delay nobody ever gave a name to; none of it has anything to do with intelligence. The mind: fear of the exam is one reason, what is happening at home is another. And the school and the house: class size, materials, whether the teacher is there, field work, no place to study, no light after dark.
One of our children kept getting headaches and could not read the letters on the board. Somebody noticed, and took him to the eye hospital. Short-sighted in both eyes. He came back with glasses, and a follow-up in three months. Nobody had to call him anything.
To each of the five there is an answer, or we go looking for one. Not all of it, every year, for every child. What is still missing gets written down too.
A child is not slow. Something is in the way. Finding out what is the work.
