Education Nepal Project #50624

Educating 100+Girls in College in Nepal Every Year

by The Small World

Educating 100+Girls in College in Nepal Every Year

Project Report | Dec 19, 2022
Manish and Hari welcome at Arhaus Children's home

By Karma Sherpa | Executive Director & Co-Founder

Brother and sister at Arhaus Children's home

The Arhaus Children’s Home in Solukhumbu

The destruction of families, resulting in homeless and orphaned children at severe risk from trafficking, child labor, and other serious abuses, has been a major issue in Nepal with the 2015 earthquake killing over 10,000 people, followed by the disastrous impact of the Covid pandemic and its continued effect on children’s welfare and education and, indeed, their very survival.

Such ongoing challenges created the need for building the Arhaus Children’s Home, generously funded by our long-term partners, Arhaus, a major furniture company in the United States, and brought to fruition in 2020 by many individual contributors, volunteers, and local community members. Fortunately, during the pandemic, we were able to provide shelter for many children as well as help the communities by sharing food, medicine, vaccines, and continuing education for the children. We were also fortunate because, in the earlier years of The Small World programs, we supported many children in their education, so imagine our great delight when many came forth to help during this pandemic by giving back and teaching at the Arhaus Home, especially since schools closed for the two years of the pandemic.

The Arhaus Children’s Home project is the first project of its kind in the Solukhumbu region and enjoys a deep connection with the local culture and communities. Buying food from local communities to feed the children helped to create a bond with locals and to generate income for them. For the children, maintaining a very close relationship with the communities is quite genuine since they speak the same language, share the same culture for understanding, and share roots in the same physical environment. This helps to keep the children connected with the communities despite their traumatic losses in the family, home, and security.

Here at the Arhaus Children’s Home, our goal has been to create a beautiful environment with peace, love, and brotherhood and sisterhood, especially since both boys and girls live here! It is very much a group effort with the children, we are proud to share, helping each other with great kindness both in groups and individually. Although the primary goal is to provide the gift of education for their future successes, there is so much more than academic learning going on. The children engage in physical sports, trekking, learning about farming and agriculture, and gaining personal and social responsibility with home duties such as doing their own laundry, taking turns cooking (even the boys), washing dishes, cleaning the house, etc. With this project active for almost two years now, we have watched the children change and become so different – very happy instead of traumatized and alienated; able to communicate comfortably and openly, especially by sharing their stories; demonstrating a growing self-confidence and self-esteem; and looking so very healthy with shining faces.

WELCOMING HARI AND MANISHA:

Very recently, we have welcomed two new children to the Home. The boy, Hari , is seven years old, and his sister, Manisha, is 3-1/2 years old. Their father passed from Covid about six months ago, so they had to work for other families as unpaid servants. Then, just last month, their mother committed suicide. To add to their challenges, they were born into the lowest of Nepal’s caste systems, called Daalid, which makes it very difficult to find work and guarantees suffering discrimination in the rural areas. Today, they are slowly beginning to smile again and are fitting in quite nicely with the love within the Home and from the other children. This is a representative story of most of the children here at Arhaus Home. Here is their picture as they arrived at the home.

TO SPONSOR A CHILD – A YEAR IS $1,500.

Includes: Education, books, uniforms, food, health care, etc. Basically, this includes entire expenses for a year.

Links:

The Friends of Arhaus Children's Home

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Jun 21, 2022
HAPPY FATHER'S DAY

By Karma Sherpa | Executive Director

Dec 28, 2021
Merry Christmas & Happy Holiday

By Karma Sherpa | Executive Director & Co-Founder

Merry Christmas

Dear Friends and Supporters ,

We hope you're doing well and staying safe.

We sincerely hope that despite this challenging year, you were able to experience joy and make amazing memories, and wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday!

In the wake of Covid-19 in Nepal, every aspect of human life has been significantly disrupted, especially for children in regards to their education and safety. Like any developing country, orphans and vulnerable children in Nepal have been at the highest risk during the pandemic, facing not only hunger but also trafficking and abuse as they remained out of school.

Therefore, our goal to protect them by providing relief foods, safe places to live, and the gift of education made our work at The Small World more important than ever. We have rescued and our relief support has benefited over 1,000 children during the pandemic.

Due to their remote locations, children faced a huge learning crisis during this pandemic. Particularly in geographically challenged regions like Solukhumbhu, it's nearly impossible for students to take online classes since basic infrastructures like electricity & internet have never been introduced.

The Arhaus Children's Home has provided not only food and a safe, loving environment to over 80 marginalized students, but also much needed organized daily classes inside the home. With every school in the region closed, our Senior girls from the Solukhumbhu Girls' dorm have been homeschooling students in the home while also maintaining safety rules. This has not only ensured continued education but has also established a strong family bond between the senior and junior students.

As the government prepared to open physical schools, many students, especially from marginalized families who suffered from this pandemic, have needed support with Back-to-School preparedness, so The Small World has distributed school bags, stationeries, face masks, and sanitizers to over 1,500 students in the Solukhumbhu area.

We couldn't have done this without the help of our incredible partner organizations and really appreciate their support. Next year, we aspire to continue on our mission and spread smiles across even more faces, with the aim of reaching 2000 more students by mid-2022!

Please consider telling your friends and family about our project—you can https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/a-year-end-gift-to-change-the-lives-of-children/ on social media, or just bring us up in conversation. Sharing with your community why you chose to support our organization will help us increase the work we can do in our community.

Karma Sherpa
Executive Director & Co-Founder
*The Small World*
Email: karma@thesmallworld.org

www.thesmallworld.org

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