Welcome to Ghimire Foundation

Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/news/columnists/la-me-parsons3mar03,1,4647596.column?coll=la-news-columns

DANA PARSONS

Horrifying story, far-off land -- but an O.C. prof refuses to let it go

Visiting Nepal and finding that young girls are being sold as sex slaves, he takes action.

It started off, like a lot of amazing things do, as something totally different than what it became.

In the beginning, the trip Cal State Fullerton professor Jeffrey Kottler took six years ago to a remote area of Nepal was merely a research project with a doctoral student studying maternal mortality. For Kottler, the trip afforded both a chance to supervise the student and, not incidentally, visit an exotic part of the world.

What he found jarred him.

New mothers who might well die in a pool of blood in a barn because no one in a village would go to another town to get help.

He found that local custom put such decisions in the hands of the woman's mother-in-law, who might well prefer that her daughter-in-law die from a difficult pregnancy because it would allow her son to marry a presumably stronger woman for future children.

Not even that was the worst of it, however.

Kottler also discovered that young girls, maybe 10 to 12 years old, simply disappeared from the village. "I started investigating what was going on," he says, "and what I learned was that sex slavers were coming from northern India and either stealing the girls, or in many cases the families were selling the girls because they couldn't afford to feed them."

We'd all be appalled by that, especially because part of the ostensible rationale is that some in India believed that having sex with a virgin would prevent AIDS in men who already were HIV-positive.

Not all of us would do anything about it, however. Especially if we were returning to the comforts of Huntington Beach, as Kottler was.

The man, however, apparently is bred from good stock. "I found this so horrifying," he says. "I had never heard anything so awful in my life. There were literally tears in my eyes when I heard this story. I said to Kiran [his grad student], 'We have to do something about this.' "

They asked the village school principal to identify one girl who was both bright and from the lowest economic class and, therefore, at risk of being sold. He identified a girl named Inu. "I peeled off two 20s and a 10 and gave it to the principal," Kottler says, "and I said, 'This keeps her in school for a year.' "

That's how it started. Kottler has returned each year since. He and Kiran Regmi set up the Madhav Ghimire Foundation, named after Kieran's father, who also happens to be Nepal's poet laureate.

On his second visit, Kottler added three girls to the list. As of this year, donations from a circle of friends and others have spared 42 girls from being sold, Kottler says.

In the third year, the strategy shifted slightly. Rather than just give money to the principal, Kottler and his team visited the girls' homes and had a bit of a ceremony.

He took Polaroids of the girls, some of whom had never seen a photo of themselves, and told villagers that the girls were honorees. That way, he says, peer pressure would help ensure that the girls remained in school.

In addition, Kiran, who is one of the country's few women physicians, lives close enough to the village that she can vouch that the money goes to the girls' education. A philanthropist from a nearby town also helps monitor things.

I ask Kottler what it costs to keep a 12-year-old girl, for example, in school until she graduates from high school. "Maybe $300," he says.

It's all insanity, of course. That people are that vulnerable. That we live the way we do while people elsewhere surrender their children to sex traders or, in the more charitable view, to people who say they'll find work for their young children in India to save them from starvation.

The village Kottler visited the first year had about 200 people. He doesn't think they'd ever had visitors. They didn't know where America was.

The typical house backed against a field, and it was common for an animal to be tethered to the back wall.

Children are barefoot and eat one meal a day of rice and watery lentil-type soup. It's a place where a father can be killed by a tiger.

But it's not what you might think. By the second year's visit, Kottler wanted Americans to visit the village, rather than simply write him a check.

"It's not just about changing lives in Nepal," he says. "I want the girls to change the lives of people here. Despite their poverty, they're happy, they always have a smile on their face, they're grateful to be alive."

He can't help but contrast that with what he sees here. "I come back to Orange County, where we're so focused on acquisitions and buying and owning things, and so many people are unhappy no matter what they covet or want," Kottler says.

Kottler will make his next trip later this year. The last visit, a couple months ago, included a special moment. Inu, now 18, has graduated from high school and attends college to someday become a university professor.

At a ceremony, she thanked her patrons for their help.

"She gave a speech in halting English," Kottler says, "and I was sobbing uncontrollably. Here was this now young woman who I'd met as a girl who not only survived but flourished and was talking about gratitude and what she intends to do with her life. It was one of the most powerful moments of my life."

Dana Parsons' column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it An archive of his recent columns is at http://www.latimes.com/parsons .

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Changing the World One Girl at a Time: A California Professor's Calling in Nepal

By John Child in Kathmandu

Dr. Jeffrey Kottler came to Nepal as a teacher of counseling skills but says that he “became the pupil, captured by the beauty of Nepal’s mountains and people, but also by the desire to do something to help needy children here.” 

The professor of counseling at California State University in Fullerton and author of more than 75 books was transformed by what he saw in Nepal's villages and schools and by meeting Dr. Kiran Regmi, a Nepali physician and professor dedicated to improving the health infrastructure in rural Nepal for women and children. Regmi was working with him at the time to complete her Ph.D. in public health policy.

Kottler says admiringly, “She's the most accomplished woman I know, with a medical degree, masters degrees in public health and anthropology, and a doctorate.” Regmi's description of the plight of poor families in rural Nepal matched what Kottler had seen while doing research in remote areas. In one village he had met the headmaster of a school who told him that an academically gifted girl was leaving school because her family couldn't afford the fees. Other girls in the village had “disappeared,” perhaps ending up as indentured servants or as sex workers. Kottler asked what the fees cost, and when told how little it was he impulsively took out his wallet and paid for a year’s support.

“Do you realize what you've done?” asked Dr Regmi later. As kind as the gesture was, she explained, only a long term commitment was really going to help that girl. And by the way, one girl was just a drop in the bucket.

With the collaboration of Digumber Piya, a Nepali businessman, philanthropist and community activist, they founded the Madhav Ghimire Foundation, named after Dr Regmi's father, the national poet of Nepal. From that first girl in 2003, the foundation now supports 73 students and plans to add 25 more in 2009.

The commitment is long term. Scholarship students are promised that as long as their work continues to be excellent, the foundation will pay for their education as far as they can carry it. At least one student, now in 11^th grade, has the potential for medical school, says Kottler. Many of the other girls hope to become nurses, teachers, engineers, perhaps leaders of the country in the future.

That will be expensive. “We'll need big money eventually to keep these promises," he says solemnly. It only costs $100 per year to keep a girl in primary or secondary school, but 20 times that amount to pay for university and graduate studies. Most of the donations he receives are small contributions from students and teachers in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. The foundation is now looking for a million dollars, a many-fold increase from their current budget. It's not easy: the amount is substantial but too small for major philanthropies. “I'm waiting for our Mortensen moment,” says Kottler, referring to Greg Mortensen, whose Central Asia Institute builds schools and promotes girls' education in Pakistan. Mortensen's story is told in the book Three Cups of Tea.

For now the foundation is financed by donations and run entirely by Kottler and other volunteers.  Kottler brings annual trips to Nepal for those interested, mostly counsellors, educators, students, and health professionals. Participants are expected to raise funds and become “inspirational witnesses” back home for the foundation's work.

The volunteers visit foundation schools, some accessible by road but others requiring a stiff walk into the rural countryside where nearly 80 percent of Nepal's population lives. I joined the group last month on one visit.

Our goal was Sri Chandra school, about 20 miles from the nearest road in the village of Bahundanda, the birthplace of Madhav Ghimire. The river is only half a mile away from the village as the crow flies but 1,500 feet below town, and the hills equally far away to the northeast are 2,500 feet above. The village stretches out along a narrow ridge no more than 100 feet wide. A few alleys descend precipitously on each side, with houses clinging to the steep hillside or perched around the ridge where there's a bit of level ground.

The main street is paved in slate flagstones with low rain gutters along the sides, and there's a public water tap and resting place for travelers at the crossroads where the trail enters town and almost immediately departs again downhill. Our busy lodge and a next-door twin sit at one end of town; behind us the ridge falls away dizzyingly.

The fields that terrace the whole hill around are mostly fallow in the dry winter season, but crops of vegetables and brilliant yellow mustard patchwork the ground. Flocks of sheep and goats down from higher pasture for the winter scavenge the fields, while water buffalo chew their cud and chickens and ducks peck in the dirt paths.

The town of fewer than 100 households sends nearly 250 students to the school, which occupies a large flat area at the far end of the ridge from our lodge. Twelve classrooms take up the two long sides of an open courtyard, with a covered stage at one of the short ends and a two-story building with a cafeteria and administration offices at the other. It's a good school by Nepali standards, with benches and desks in the rooms and chalkboards throughout.

Early in the morning after our arrival the school's headmaster took the group off for home visits. The home visits are a key part of the foundation's strategy, since a group of foreigners showing up at someone's door inevitably brings out all the neighbors and passers-by. Doing the whole process in public - the student's promise to study, the family's promise to keep her in school, and the foundation's promise of continued support - is the social glue that Kottler thinks will hold the program together.

It took a little less than two hours to visit five scholarship students' households, and the group then returned to the school for an assembly. Benches from the classrooms had been pulled out into the central courtyard, with chairs along the front and sides and places of honor for the foreign guests.

Like any school assembly, the younger children were fidgety and the oldest ones put on attitudes of studied boredom. But unlike any assembly in my experience, children swarmed up to give us flowers, mostly poinsettia blossoms. Soon our laps were overflowing and the table next to us was covered.

Children danced, sang and recited, mostly rather well, and Kottler and several other team members spoke briefly. “We are pleased to be here," Kottler told the children, “and so proud of everything you are doing.” Kottler later explained that the foundation's plan is to grow the next generation of women doctors and professionals to help their villages and their country.

With that Kottler and the other volunteers gave each teacher a kit of resource materials, and then asked the headmaster to call the scholarship students up one by one. The volunteers handed each child a backpack full of notebooks, writing materials, books and small gifts including a stone animal fetish donated by the Zuni Nation, a Native American tribe in the Southwest U.S. that has famed artisans.

Finally a tarp-covered mound at the back of the courtyard was revealed to be a huge pile of books, puzzles, games and sporting equipment for the school plus whiteboards for every classroom. The foundation's strategy is to support its scholarship students not only by paying their fees but also by improving the schools where they study.

The school visits move some of the volunteers deeply. The cause has become “a purpose and direction for my life that continues to this very day,” writes one of the past volunteers on the foundation's web site. Many have returned, and several volunteers have stayed on to work in the villages for months at a time, mentoring children and helping in the schools.

I was inspired too, and my partner in Friends in High Places, A.D. Sherpa, and I contributed supplies for the schools and funded a half-dozen scholarships this year. Next year we hope to help the foundation expand into the Everest area to support academically gifted girls whose fathers have died in climbing accidents in the mountains.

The Madhav Ghimire Foundation is supported totally by contributions and volunteer efforts. It is registered in both Nepal and in the United States as a 501(c)(3) tax exempt charitable organization. Visit the foundation at http://www.ghimirefoundation.org/.