This is not my story

Girl on the edge.

In the last year or so, a young boy found himself the benefactor of the kindness of a stranger.  He left his home, which had burned to the ground with his three sisters in it, seeking a better opportunity for himself, at the behest of his mother. After the accident the boy was content to skip school and roam the streets with his friends.  I learned this through Anamika who was instrumental in finding him when he went missing after the accident.  She learned of his story through the Nepali grapevine and worked to track him down and later connect him with a sponsor.  The story continues as one of the benefactors arrives to Kathmandu this week and plans to take him home for a visit. He hasn’t seen his mother in a while and she has recently been quite ill. 

The other day Anamika took me along to find him at school and talk to him about how things are going and update him on the upcoming visit. He seemed quite pleased at the news, and Anamika seemed quite interested to check up on him.  This isn’t really my story to tell, but when spending time with Anamika, it is hard not to care for the things she cares for, and feel somewhat involved. I can only imagine that being the liaison that helps bring a boy back into a lifestyle that may allow him to be successful in life isn’t something you can easily leave in a file on your desk drawer at work when you go home at night.

This next one is my story.  Today I found myself nearly knee deep in a river and thinking of my friend Kathy.

Roof top kitty.

While Kathy is the type of friend who would quite readily go knees deep or deeper into a river with me, the difference here was, I was tromping around barefoot trying to avoid going through a large, half-burned pile of garbage, in a completely filthy river because I heard a kitten mewing.  It broke my heart… what was a kitten doing in the river?

My friend Srijana took me to see her farm on the outskirts of the Kathmandu Valley, which was super cool.  We had to park the scooter and walk in a ways to get to their plot. As we were walking along and I hear this distressed mewing sound coming from the river so immediately I'm shoes-off in the river trying to get to it. Its eyes had barely opened, and I can only imagine someone threw it in the river to get rid of it because people here "don't like cats".  As we were leaving I was keeping my eye out for a nice little girl, but none came so these English-speaking boys said they would take it… so I am telling myself the pretty little lie that they will do right by that poor little thing.

Women in a village we walked through.

Srijana bought a sizeable farm with 4 friends about a year and a half ago.  She is really interested in ‘just food systems’ and personal self-sufficiency, which is why she got the idea to start her own farm.  Her friends were also interested in the financial rewards so they were excited to join the venture.

When we went there, the family who lives on the farm full time wasn’t around, so we checked out the tomato tunnels (mini greenhouse type shelters) which in some cases were growing up to three or four types of vegetables at once, an great use of space as well as a good way to continually have something to harvest.