USA-Nepal Collaboration
25 Years of Humanitarian Service in Nepal

 

What can we give the people of Nepal? With our projects, we hope to provide Hope and Opportunities for the people of Nepal. When we think about what motivates us to serve, we are drawn to this word, which is the name of our current mission, The Asha Project. To us, hope and opportunity are really at the core of Rotary’s mission. It is what motivates us to help the people of Nepal.

Hope and opportunity brought me to America 45 years ago and I always wanted to do something for the less fortunate in Nepal. Now, my son, Anil, has joined me as an E-club member in our district to assist with this project. We are taking our third humanitarian mission to Nepal together.

For over 25 years, the Rotary Club of Branchburg and District 7510 in collaboration and partnership with the Friends of Nepal-NJ has been working to provide scholarship funds, micro-credit loans, and training programs through Rotary international grants. Our collaborative projects partner with many community organizations as well as Rotary clubs in Nepal to create a new network of hope.

We formally created The Asha Project in response to the April 2015 earthquake in Nepal. In March 2016, we traveled to Nepal with the goal of rebuilding homes. When we visiting a rebuilding project, we spoke with many people in the community and they told us that they were interested in opportunities to work cooperatively with other organizations.

We realized that house building was not enough. For a country that has spent decades dealing with political turmoil and economic instability, we recognized that simply resetting life to what it was like prior to the earthquake was only a beginning.

This is why the three pillars of the Asha project are: building homes to help create stronger families, creating $100,000 microcredit loans to provide a prosperous future and grow micro-businesses, and providing Rays of Hope scholarships for under-represented ethnic groups.

We are furthering our collaboration by sending our Rotaract students to volunteer in Nepal during their winter break. We also recently welcomed a student from Nepal to complete his master’s program in health management funded by a global grant scholarship. We are working on several digital divide computer projects to connect these students with the outside world as part of District 3292’s Total Literacy Project.