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After a long and illuminating Skype conversation with our dear friend and CDBO (Chief of Documentary Brainstorming Operations), Chris Boulton, we resolved that our film is about women.

What drives most of the conversations we’re involved in here is this simple fact: When women break the generational cycle of undereducation, early marriage, and overwork–only then does their society make meaningful strides toward development.

What we’re looking at, then, is not just a bunch of girls who get lucky and get sponsored by rich foreigners, but behind that there are a bunch of mothers making huge sacrifices and taking huge risks to put their daughters in a position to gain this foothold in the developing world.

Over and over we’re hearing girls say stuff like, “my grandmother got married at 7, my mother at 17, and my older sister just got married at 27. I want to be at least 35 before I marry.”

Now, this may not accurately reflect the reality, even for the girls who do graduate from high school, or even those few who go on to university. Plenty are still married off by their families in arranged marriages.

But what it means to us is that there is this whole big league of girls and women (heady language alert!), united in this struggle to throw off the yoke…

• of getting married too young
• before they have an education
• or a chance really even to learn who they are as adults
• or to learn how to cook healthy foods
• or keep a sanitary home
• or that–screw tradition, they can have their babies in a hospital, instead of in the chicken coop
• and stuff like that, that sounds overdramatic, but that is really part of life for women and girls here.

Meet our newest contestants: Pragya, Prinina, and Manita. Strong women.

Pragya’s dad was assassinated five years ago under suspicion of spying. Pragya and her sister were in the house. Manita was in the kitchen. Dad was in the bedroom of their home, several hours from Kathmandu. Today the three live on the outskirts of town, at the end of the airport’s main runway.

Our sense of Mom, after a long afternoon’s visit, is that she knows the meaning of struggle, and isn’t afraid to infuse it with a little beauty and light. Their sweet little house just thrums with the kind of love and soft touches that often don’t thrive in the presence of men.

I hope that we will be able to show some of this, as this family will be featuring in our movie as well. Even as they miss their husband/father achingly, they all have something to say about the need for women to go it alone.

Pragya (who, granted, is only 12, so take it for what it’s worth) said, “Nah, I’m not getting married till I’m 50!

     Amy and Pragya compare notes on men.

     Macaroons and photo albums: That’s a nice afternoon.