One Women’s Dream for 80 Children

 It’s no exaggeration to say that Mala Kharel has one very big dream. How can you provide a safe, secure and loving school for some of Kathmandu’s poorest children? She puzzled over this question and then put her ideas to work. Rent a big house and offer food, shelter and teachers. The children would come, and hence began Bal Sarahi. I first heard of this “street school” so called because most of the children she hoped to attract were living in extreme poverty. In fact many have parents who are street beggars. Education is not free in Nepal, you need to be able to buy a uniform and books. You need a tiffin (snack) bucket, food to put in it for your day at school, and you need parents willing to give you the day off from work-yep, in a country where trying to put food on a- well, at this level of poverty there is not a table to put food on- so let’s just say in order to have food - period, everyone needs to work. Mala’s dream was, convince parents and children that  coming to school and learning can help everyone eventually, in the long run, education means literacy. And being literate means more opportunity than begging. And so Bal Sarathi, Mala’s school for everyone for free, began. 

We started helping Mala about 10 years ago by donating what we could at Hands in Nepal when we could. The list is long to run a school for some 80 children, from preschool to grade 5. There’s the usual school expense like hiring teachers, a cook for daily meals, food and water. Water? There is no city piped water here so Mala needs to buy water brought in by truck, enough to cook, drink and wash with. 80 kids. Everyday.

Mala and I with a few of the super students at Bal Sarathi

There’s no end to the list of needs for a school that helps the poorest of the poor…

Keeping the water flowing is the easy problem of keeping this dream school going. There wasn’t enough money in the budget this year for every student to have their own workbook, so some had to share. There’s not enough in the budget to have a table for eating their daily meal, so children sit in the floor with their plate of rice and Dahl. Every month, Mala needs to pay her staff of 9 teachers, 2 helpers and her principal, pay the water bill and buy the food. But she does it, month by month. It’s never easy, she told me today, “There’s always something else we need. Sometimes I have to tell the teachers I can’t give them their full salary until we get more money, But we do it day by day and keep the doors open.”

You can see that ernest joy on the faces of the children as they labor over their workbooks. Or at least those who got a workbook. Each classroom had the proud work on exhibit of kids who take pride in their learning. Mala has a dream, and the children are at the center of her vision. It was easy to felt he infectious joy that flowed from the children,the teachers and Mala with her endless energy guiding all. It only took one amazing woman to get this  “free for all” school rolling, but it will take all of us to keep it going.

Enjoy these photos I took today. If you’d like to help us help Mala, you can donate on our website, where we have a PayPal button. You can also send a check made out to Hands in Nepal at PO Box 738, Santa Margarita 93453. Do you want to come to Nepal with me someday and help out at Bal Sarathi? Let me know! This is the type of deeply gratifying work that makes your heart fill with love. As the motto on the classroom wall I visited today said, “Servitude is the best religion”- true that!

Namaste!