In 2006, Maggie Doyne finished high school in New Jersey while most of her friends were preparing for university. She packed a backpack instead, and her travels eventually took her to Surkhet, in western Nepal, not long after the end of a civil war that had lasted a decade. There, on a dry riverbed, she met a seven-year-old girl named Hima who was breaking stones and selling them to help feed her family.

The encounter presented Doyne with a problem both enormous and unexpectedly specific. She could do almost nothing about the poverty surrounding her. She could not repair the consequences of a civil war, provide livelihoods for families she did not know or build an education system. But she discovered that putting Hima into school cost very little. She paid the fees, bought her a uniform and books, and enrolled her. Soon she was helping other children do the same.

What initially looked like a problem of school fees became more complicated. Some of the children Doyne encountered did not merely lack access to education. Poverty, displacement and family circumstances had left some without a safe place to live. Paying tuition could get a child into a classroom; it could not guarantee that the child had somewhere secure to return to afterwards. The problem had grown beyond anything an eighteen-year-old travelling through Nepal could reasonably solve by herself, and it required experience she did not have.

Building something that could last

By then Doyne knew Tope Bahadur Malla, a Nepali man who had spent more than fifteen years caring for children at Ramana's Garden, a home in India for Nepali refugee children. Malla had been orphaned as a boy and had grown up in a small Himalayan village. The war had forced him from Nepal, and eventually he decided to return. He brought years of practical experience caring for vulnerable children, knowledge of the country and an understanding of what building a safe home actually required.

Doyne and Malla began working together. In 2007, Doyne used her life savings, $5,000, to buy a small piece of land in Surkhet. Yet the familiar version of a story like this, in which a determined outsider arrives with some money and builds an orphanage, misses much of what happened next. Local families helped pour the foundations. Supporters elsewhere contributed money. A Nepali NGO and the US nonprofit BlinkNow were established to support the work. In 2008, the Kopila Valley Children's Home opened.

The home solved one problem while making others more visible. A child does not experience poverty as a collection of separate programmes. Education is affected by whether there is food at home, whether a parent can earn an income, whether healthcare is available, whether a girl is safe, whether somebody can reach a counsellor when they need one, and whether the adults around a child have enough security to make plans beyond the next emergency.

Kopila Valley expanded as those connections became clearer. A school followed the children's home, then programmes supporting women, healthcare and counselling, employment opportunities and environmental initiatives. What had begun as a response to the circumstances of individual children was becoming an attempt to address some of the conditions surrounding them.

THE SCALE OF THE WORK

What grew from that first act

400+students educated tuition-free at Kopila Valley School
Nearly 90children given a home and family since 2007
150+local teachers and staff employed by BlinkNow

Source: BlinkNow Foundation. See sources below.

Today, Kopila Valley School educates more than 400 students tuition-free. Nearly ninety children have been given a home and family through the children's home since 2007, and BlinkNow employs more than 150 local teachers and staff. The organisation describes its work as a partnership with the local community, aimed at supporting Nepal's children and young people while reducing poverty, strengthening opportunities for women, improving health and advancing sustainability and social justice. Teachers, carers, cooks, builders and administrators are overwhelmingly drawn from the community itself, while a Nepali board of leaders and elders participates in its governance.

That history complicates the easiest version of Doyne's story: a young American woman travels to a poorer country, encounters children living in circumstances that shock her, and decides to help. Told carelessly, it can become one of the oldest and most flattering stories wealthy countries tell about themselves, in which an outsider arrives, sees suffering that everyone else has somehow failed to see, and becomes the rescuer.

Doyne's decision was consequential, but so was Malla's experience. So were the families who helped build the first home, the people who funded it, the Nepali teachers and carers who came to work there, the board members who helped govern it and the young people who grew up within it. Nearly twenty years later, Kopila Valley can no longer be adequately described as the project of the teenager who first paid Hima's school fees. Its development into something locally staffed, locally governed and capable of continuing beyond its founder is part of what makes the story worth telling.

When help becomes infrastructure

There is a particular appeal in stories about beginnings. We remember the first donation, the first rescued animal, the first tree planted or the first child placed in school because these moments give large problems a human scale. Institutions are less immediately compelling. They require payrolls and policies, trained staff, governance, budgets, buildings, maintenance and people prepared to continue doing necessary work long after the original moment of inspiration has lost its novelty.

They also require an ability to discover that the first answer was insufficient. Kopila Valley did that repeatedly. School fees were not enough because some children needed homes. A home was not enough because children needed education. Neither could be separated indefinitely from health, family income, women's opportunities or the community in which those children would eventually become adults. Each response exposed another part of the problem and required people with different knowledge to become involved.

Over time, the question therefore changed. It was no longer simply what Doyne could do for a child she had met. It became what could be built with other people, what knowledge those people possessed, and what might remain useful when the person who initiated the work was no longer at its centre. Good intentions are relatively easy to admire. Building something capable of being corrected, enlarged and eventually shared is harder.

What grew beside the river

The distance between Hima on the riverbed and Kopila Valley today is difficult to compress into the familiar claim that one small act changed everything. It didn't. Thousands of subsequent acts did. Doyne could pay one child's school fees, but she could not personally provide everything that child, or the children who followed her, would need. Malla knew things she did not. Local families could do things neither of them could do alone. Teachers, carers, health workers, administrators, donors and community leaders enlarged the work again. Children who grew up within Kopila Valley became adults with knowledge and professions of their own; some became doctors, teachers and carers themselves.

Large problems can distort our sense of scale. Faced with poverty, displacement, war or ecological destruction, an individual response can appear absurdly small. Often it is small. Paying one child's school fees does not solve poverty, and pretending that it does diminishes the problem rather than honouring the act. But an action can be inadequate to the whole problem and still alter what becomes possible next.

Kopila Valley grew partly because the people involved kept discovering the inadequacy of what they had already done. Instead of treating each discovery as proof that the effort had failed, they allowed it to change the work. More people became involved, bringing knowledge and experience that the founders did not possess, and a private act of assistance gradually became a community of homes, classrooms, jobs, services and relationships.

Hima was seven years old when Doyne encountered her breaking stones beside a river. Neither of them could have known what would follow. There was no children's home, school, health programme or organisation contained invisibly inside that encounter. There was a child who should have been in school and somebody standing nearby who discovered that, for this particular child, she could make that happen.

Everything larger had to be built afterwards, by many more hands.

READ AND WATCH THE STORY

Between the Mountain and the Sky

Maggie Doyne told this story herself in Between the Mountain and the Sky: A Mother's Story of Love, Loss, Healing and Hope (2022), the memoir that the documentary of the same name is based on. The film follows Maggie, Tope and the Kopila Valley family across nearly two decades, and is currently available to watch online through its official site, with forty per cent of profits going directly to support BlinkNow.

Watch the film → Explore the work of BlinkNow →

Sources and further reading

Image credit

Hero image: Maggie Doyne and Tope Bahadur Malla with the Kopila Valley community. Photo courtesy of BlinkNow Foundation.