Project Report
| Dec 19, 2022
Manish and Hari welcome at Arhaus Children's home
![Brother and sister at Arhaus Children's home]()
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.
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