Real People | Real Stories

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Yesterday we visited with and briefly interviewed one party to the Creation Story of the Little Sisters Fund.

It’s a sweet story that I don’t want to spoil here, but Bindhaya was the first girl that Trevor Patzer was introduced to after he asked Usha Acharya how he might help the country of Nepal.

We had met Bindhaya before, a couple times since we’ve been here, and it was always a pleasure. She’s a quiet, slight girl with thick glasses and quick, funny-lively eyes. Behind the quiet, always a joke. A spark.

Bindhaya has graduated from school, and is now studying in the health care world, and working on a kind of nursing internship. We followed her on her rounds yesterday at the tiny hospital where she works.

The video we shot at the hospital was really the object of our meeting with Bindhaya, but the morning we spend in her house was equally brilliant for us.

We had a wonderful interview with her mother, Indira, who told about the difficulty of raising daughters without family support–on account of having dropped out of school and gotten married at 17 in a love marriage.

Even today arranged marriages are the norm, and 20-some years ago, it was quite a scandal. She laughed about it in the interview (it’s easy to see where Bindhaya’s spark comes from), but it was clear that she is someone who’d endured some hardship.

This was the interview that convinced us we could rely upon Nepali speakers responding in their mother tongue. Indira-didi told us about how having her daughters’s education supported has enabled them to have enough money to care for their health, and to live in a decent home. 

She related, in a way that choked up all three of us (Nutan, Amy and me), how genuinely grateful she is for the support of the Little Sisters Fund, and how it is her fondest wish and full expectation that her daughters will ‘give back’ by going to do their good works in villages like she grew up in. She spoke of the good that needs doing in places with no schools, no hospitals, no running water or electricity.

Quite a while into our stay in Nepal, we were finally served some traditional, mom-made Nepali food in Indira-didi’s kitchen. About time, Nepal!

After our interview with her, I followed Indira to her simple, warm (and beautifully sunlit) kitchen, where I filmed her preparing some food. I figured it was for the family, until she served it and insisted we sit and eat.

Joy! Dal bat! Dried, pickled, pepper-rubbed radish slices. New Food! Made with care! From ingredients grown in the common patch of soil just down the hill from their house.