My experiences with Nepal-Finland

I started the blog with the motive to share the information that I know about Finland. In fact, I still remember how much of hours I spend on Internet when I was thinking about Finland. I spend hours and hours surfing a number of websites to solve the query of my mind. So, I started www.nepalfinland.com after coming here thinking that this blog will somehow help those who are seeking information about Finland.

I started the blog with awareness to students for avoiding consultancy services. Though I did not process through any consultancy, I knew some of my friends being victim of Consultancy. Consultancy charged them about 1500 euro just for posting the application. They use to say they can influence the admission process. They say, they have some 'internal link' with admission officer of the university and also on the embassy for visa. A student is forced to believe that since agent of colleges are common in Kathmandu for other countries like Australia. The more dangerous stories is about jobs. They use to say, some XYZ started earning 2000 euro after 2 months and now they are sending back very handsome amount and earning 2000 is normal since it is the minimum payment scale for most of the jobs. Some alert students can easily validate this information. But, we Nepalese, believe people so easy and do not bother to validate those information. Also, they use to say, you just need draft to show to embassy and you can cancel the draft before departure which is actually a suicide attempt and completely illegal since it would be checked by border police while entering Finland. I use to work on a daily newspaper in Nepal, so all these information were known to me easily. So, these all fake stories by Consultancy ignited me to start an awareness campaign against Consultancies.

When I started Nepal-Finland, I had no intention to be anonymous. I started blogging with my real name. Later, when consultancies of Nepal and some of their agents in Finland started threatening me, I started blogging anonymous. It is not that I got afraid from them, but I became anonymous since I don't want any kind of trouble here in Finland since I came here for studies and just want to focus on my studies. So, I preferred to be anonymous. But, being anonymous did not stop threatens.

Some threats were bit polite, some were dirty, some were rough and some life-threats as well. Some came from Nepal by email and phone numbers as well. Some from different cities of Finland by agents of those consultancies. I really wonder how they came to know my identity and got my phone numbers. Only very few persons and authorities have my real identity. Till today, I am getting in average of a threat in a week. These people never get tired by threatening me, and I am never scared to expose them and aware more students.

During last academic season, I was very much active and use to reply about 50-100 emails per week. When the entrance was over, I thought, now the flow of email will reduce. But not, it remained constant since after that students started asking preparation, shopping, flight and other related issues. This process did not end even after August since after arriving here same persons started asking about various aspects of jobs, academic issues and career options.
This year, after October, I became bit selective on answering queries since I explored a large volume of students started emailing me even without reading a single post on www.nepalfinland.com. A sample email:

Hi Nepal Finland,
I would like to apply for Finland, tell me more about courses, jobs and admission issues.

Regards,
ABC

I did not find any logic on answering those emails since they are not specific enough and did not bother to explore the contents of www.nepalfinland.com. So, even if I answer them in detail about all issues, I am not assured they would read my email. First about a hundred of such emails, I replied by saying, please be more specific about your query. Later, I just stopped replying such emails and focused on specific queries.

I have already posted much information on various posts itself. Since that is a blog, all contents does not seem visible at once. So, I request you to run the search from the search button located on right-top, before submitting any query.

These days, I am replying about 100 emails per week. Today only, I replied about 90 emails. Being a student, sometimes it becomes very difficult for me to manage time for replying such a massive amount of emails. So during that period, some emails kept pending even for a month since I will reply some, but again new email comes, so the older one always piles up. I always try my best to manage enough time for it, but does not happen all the time. Effort of a single person is always less when it comes about helping thousands of people.