A Charity is Born: The Pursuit of Happiness in the Service of Others.
Budland School is becoming a valuable service in community care by selecting and finding other children with critical and tragic circumstances. Often they have no safety nets or any understanding of how to change their potential future opportunity, most likely a result of the complete lack of education of the elder generations, who also fail to appreciate its importance. Education as we know it, is a relatively new concept in Nepal, and has only really grown in the last half century. There is an understandable but still apparent negative culture of innocent ignorance that has forced certain family patterns of neglect. This is not by any means efficiently tackled by the government, and in turn directly affects a certain youth demographic in the villages. This contributes to family vulnerabilities, and can lead to unethical situations of child labour for example. Although it is now much better than in past decades, there is still a vast amount to be done. Essentially, the heart and soul of the Budland School project is to ultimately create a more intimate, locally based, close support system for these problems.
Our initiative should only help further conversations in the local villages surrounding our work by taking this action with them. I have met children working in the city losing their innocence, I have seen children leave the village to work. After meeting Ram, Monisa and the Budland school, I realised we might be able to assist the community with these worries, to do what we can to prevent this from happening. Leading by some example, I can only hope the discussion creates awareness amongst the local communities and beyond.
More recently, we helped Phul Maya and Raju, which has been an amazing, life affirming experience. This project resulted in the family becoming much more stable, and happier too. Phul Maya and Raju are still going very strong today, as I noticed when we visited earlier to gift them a couple of carpets (most simple Nepali houses have only bare concrete floors). Raju’s mother was another uneducated earthquake victim living in poverty, oblivious to what she could actually claim from the government and from international aid. Being illiterate, she was unaware of her access to the earthquake victim card granted her; that her late husband had received after the earthquake, before he sadly passed away. This left Phul Maya in a difficult position as an uneducated widow and single mother. She knew what papers she had to keep that were important but not always what they were or how to use them. With no real support system in the country for natural disaster relief, for such a large number of uneducated victims, I wonder how many more people in Nepal are still in this situation today. With only a small government subsidy to receive for less than one third of the funds for the simple economic house we built for them, the deadlines and bureaucracy boiling over the given time, I wonder how else would it have been possible for them to sustain themselves?
Looking into their family circumstances we saw it was critical we stabilise Raju’s education, with him becoming our first scholarship child. This was a program started early by both us and the school. Due to the school rebuild project gaining your support; we had already built the first retaining wall on the school site at the time. Raju’s scholarship has been going well for two years now, with them much safer, more secure, and Raju’s childhood and education are once again stable. They have a little more comfort from the tensions and strife they have been living through for the two years before we met them.
Late last year I organised two new early scholarships with the Budland School chairman Purna Tamang. Again, with two new families suffering the serious strain of neglect upon them. This time the beneficiaries of the scholarship are two poverty stricken young girls, Sapana, 6 and Anissa, 5.
Sapana is the oldest daughter and one of six siblings in her family. The oldest sibling is a disabled boy called Buddah-Rai and we are currently looking at ways to help him too. Her parents, desperate for a healthy boy, essentially kept having children until they had one. Sapana’s parents both work hard on the rice fields for little money but have a lack of understanding of the responsibilities they created for themselves with the position they are in. With both parents completely uneducated and her brother being severely disabled, Sapana will have multiple responsibilities as she grows up. We want to help her get the best life she can through the added security of our support, whilst we monitor her progress and connect with her family. She seems thoroughly happy at Budland School with one of the biggest smiles I have ever seen when I have visited, and she seems to be doing very well by all accounts.
Anissa’s story is another one rooted in negative family cycles and a lack of decent education, along with a few other serious social issues. The father left his parental responsibilities when he remarried and has essentially been absent from her life. Although the father’s physical proximity is not far, he is both physically and emotionally unavailable. Anissa is currently only being cared for by her fifteen-year-old sister. The mother left to get better work and sends a little money back when she can, essentially leaving the children to fend for themselves. They are also struggling out of a single room of corrugated tin, currently unsure when life will get better and having to grow up faster than they should have to whilst they are forced to take more responsibility for themselves than children should ever have to. They are severely vulnerable without the further support which we will be able to provide appropriately, while monitoring their domestic situations, now we have integrated them into our Building Budland Scholarship Program.
We will be continuously monitoring this area of dysfunction and increasing the scholarship admissions with the school project’s success. Our scholarship initiative now includes Raju, Sapana and Anissa, and will continue for a legal minimum term of 35 more years to help the most vulnerable local children suffering with chronic poverty that we can. The scholarship initiative has already started to much success, and is having a great impact due to the support we have been able to provide the school, thanks to your support.
So far, we have extensively developed the land for the school which includes two large retaining walls. These walls support the mountainous land above and below the future school building. It was an amazing experience constructing them, as volunteers continue to surprise me with their passion and heart, as we keep moving forward with everything we have achieved so far. I couldn’t believe the positivity and excitement they have all shown at this early stage, and some are even raising money for us too, which is incredible, and with your continued support, this is only the beginning of what we will be able to achieve together.
To be continued………
