When Lin Tzu-chun (林子鈞) returned to Taiwan in 2011 after doing volunteer work with schoolchildren at Nepal’s Gorkha District, he says he felt a bit empty.
“You teach them Chinese and English, but they won’t be able to practice after you leave,” he says. “You teach them crafts, but they don’t have the materials to do it on their own … You also don’t know their situation afterward because you cannot contact them.”
Four years later, a magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck Nepal, with the epicenter situated close to the area where Lin had visited. Many surviving families lost their homes and belongings, and today still live in metal shacks on former farmland and even in tents. They could no longer afford to send their children to school, exacerbating an already low secondary education completion rate.
Photo courtesy of Calls over Ridges
Without education, Lin says the girls get married in their mid-teens and the boys often end up as migrant manual laborers. This time, he wanted to provide long-term help.
After the earthquake, Lin and National Taiwan University classmate Tsai Wan-ting (蔡宛庭) founded Calls over Ridges (遠山呼喚). Their first endeavor was to convince 350 fellow students to drink two bubble teas less per month — NT$60 — and donate the savings over a period of five years to help 40 children from three of the affected villages attend school. They plan to raise NT$1.26 million over that period.
But other children were still in need, so beginning this week they opened the fundraising campaign to the public. Their goal: raise an additional NT$600,000 in 40 days, which would indirectly help 150 children by recruiting volunteers, boosting educational resources and finding sponsors who would be willing to donate money for tuition. Their ultimate goal is to raise NT$1.2 million from this additional campaign.
Photo courtesy of Calls over Ridges
MORE THAN JUST PROVIDING
Calls over Ridges recruited and trained over 30 volunteers and headed to Gorkha in January. Lin has high expectations for the volunteers, who spent much time preparing for the trip, such as learning first aid or how to conduct interviews with families.
“Volunteers often end up gaining more than they give,” Lin says. “We don’t want volunteers to go [to Nepal] just for the experience. I want them to have a solid understanding of what they need to accomplish.”
They brought clothes and 450 English books for one of their community projects — establishing a library in one if the schools.
They made use of a storage shed with a few stacks of dust-covered books donated by the organization Room to Read — but Lin said nobody was reading them.
This was a problem Lin frequently saw in Gorkha. Although international organizations provided immediate relief, rebuilt schools, medical stations and established other facilities, they did not provide the people with the means to make use of the resources long term. When his team visited, he noted they were the only international volunteers there.
The Calls over Ridges volunteers fixed up the shed and set up a reading system where children could write a book report in exchange for prizes from the teacher.
“This way, we know how many books the children read and whether this library is being used,” Tsai says.
Lin adds that some local women have also been asking if they could use the library, many of whom never finished school.
“Their families married them off as soon as they could,” Lin says. “But maybe some of them wanted to continue learning.”
A CHILD’S REALITY
After school, Tsai and a Nepali social worker follow one of the children home down a rugged mountain path. Each volunteer is responsible for interviewing the families, keep track of their progress and record how the money is being spent.
Tsai says the interviews are more than data collection, as one needs to see the children’s home environments to fully understand their needs.
“If you just go to school, the children there are happy,” she says. “They see you from afar and they are already laughing and waving. But that’s not the entire reality. You need to see how they really live.”
The 40 that they initially helped were in pretty dire circumstances. One family lives in a makeshift tent in a mountainous area that gets cold at night. They used to live in a stone and mud structure that collapsed in the earthquake.
Another family still lives in a decent house, but the mother of three is not even 20 years old, and the father went abroad to work and abandoned them.
The ultimate plan for these volunteers goes beyond education. Lin says will organize workshops and activities to help the students and other youth plan their future. Most people there have never been to the capital Kathmandu, and their knowledge of various careers is limited.
“If they don’t know what they want to do, it doesn’t matter how much education we give them,” Lin says.
Calls over Ridges plan to return to Nepal next month, and continue every winter and summer vacation. For more information, visit their fundraising Web site at www.flyingv.cc/projects/13115.
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