Bring healthcare to thousands in rural Nepal

Namaste friends,

2016 has been a very trying but also a very productive year for the people we serve in remote mountain villages of Tipling, Shertung, Lapa, Jharlang and Ree in Nepal’s Northern Dhading District. 

As you are aware, the devastation caused by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in April 2015 affected millions of people in Nepal. More than 8,000 people lost their lives and hundreds of thousands lost homes, schools, livestock and the means to live. 

The trauma of the quake and its hundreds of aftershocks still haunts me and my family, but the generosity and compassion of each of you is far beyond and bigger than that. I want to thank you for helping us help the people we love and serve in my country. 

I want to share with you one story in particular of a young woman from the village of Ree named Mamita whose education is currently being sponsored by Himalayan HealthCare (HHC):

I am the first born of my parents. There are 7 people in our family, including grandparents. No one had been educated in our family before… and I couldn’t go to school in the beginning of my life. My childhood was spent looking after goats. 

When I was 8 or 9 years old, my parents saw other kids going to school, and they put me into a school called Pasang Chowki… I am the first literate member of the family.

After the earthquake, our home was destroyed. There was no safe place to hide from the rain or the sun. There was rubble everywhere. We didn’t know where to live or what to eat… Whatever we’d had in our home was buried in rubble.

Then the HHC scholarship results came in, and I got a chance to study science. I had decided to pursue this topic because there was a shortage of science teachers in the villages so I wanted to study science and return to my village to teach.

Because of my economic condition, HHC offered to support me in my studies and I was very happy to hear it. I’ll finish my science studies and will go to my village and help, and will give education to those who need it. I want to thank from my heart HHC for giving me a chance to fulfill my wish to study science.

Stories like Mamita’s are all too common in Northern Dhading, where the everyday struggles of living in poverty were compounded by the devastation of the earthquake. 

We are grateful to have had the opportunity, thanks to donors like you, to not only provide shelter, food, clean water, medical relief and other long-term support to families like Mamita’s, but to continue our support of promising students and health workers dedicated to improving quality of life in their villages. 

During the 2015-16 academic year, HHC has sponsored 14 students, providing comprehensive support for technical and other studies. This continues an HHC tradition since 1992, under which we have supported students, which particular emphasis on ethnic minorities, as health assistants, auxiliary health workers, nurse midwives, hospital managers, teachers, doctors, nurses, veterinary technicians and more. And it is a tradition we are committed to continuing. 

This #GivingTuesday, donations made to Himalayan HealthCare through GlobalGiving will be matched with generous support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. For those of you who are able to donate at this time, your donations—in any amount—will contribute to supporting more students like Mamita in the coming academic year. 

Our work is only possible because of the incredible generosity and outpouring of kindness from donors like you, many of whom have accompanied us on medical treks to the villages and seen the impact of our work firsthand, and many of you whom we’ve never met who nonetheless have stepped up to help us out of pure compassion for fellow human beings in duress. I cannot tell you how this has touched me and changed me in so many ways. 

Your kindness and blessings have saved hundreds of lives and continue to serve those who are deeply in need.

Thank you from Nepal and happy holidays to you and your loved ones,

Anil Parajuli