Unsung Heroes
By: Jenipher Young-Hall
My heart is filled with admiration for three women whose courage and dedication have helped to change the lives of cleft palate children and young students.
They live in Nepal, one of the world’s most beautiful countries. It has been called a “Tiny Mountain Kingdom” and is filled with raw natural beauty. Nepal’s crown jewel, Mt. Everest, lies among the highest peaks of the Himalayas stretching the length of the country. Despite Nepal’s ancient temples, and breathtaking vistas it is undergoing a brutal civil war in which an estimated thirteen thousand have been killed in the last nine years. The group that has suffered most are villagers outside Kathmandu. The capital is Kathmandu and is very different from the rural areas. It is a city that was noted in a new publication “The City Book” as being the fourteenth top city in the world. But when one leaves the borders of Kathmandu it is a very primitive world, much as it was eighty years ago.
I first met Lela when I went to Nepal as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996. She was from a local village. Sweet and very shy, she tended to erupt in fits of giggles whenever the spotlight focused on her. She had an equivalent of a third grade education, like many of her peers. Seventy-two of the women in Nepal are illiterate. Lela and another woman took the first group of children in need of cleft palate surgery and their guardians to the hospital. It took the small group of twelve people seventeen hours in an old bus over tiny mountain roads to arrive at the hospital. One father carried his three-year old daughter for three days to meet the bus to begin the journey with the others. Another child came with her grandmother who wore a pair of plastic flip flops on her feet.
My heart is filled with admiration for three women whose courage and dedication have helped to change the lives of cleft palate children and young students.
They live in Nepal, one of the world’s most beautiful countries. It has been called a “Tiny Mountain Kingdom” and is filled with raw natural beauty. Nepal’s crown jewel, Mt. Everest, lies among the highest peaks of the Himalayas stretching the length of the country. Despite Nepal’s ancient temples, and breathtaking vistas it is undergoing a brutal civil war in which an estimated thirteen thousand have been killed in the last nine years. The group that has suffered most are villagers outside Kathmandu. The capital is Kathmandu and is very different from the rural areas. It is a city that was noted in a new publication “The City Book” as being the fourteenth top city in the world. But when one leaves the borders of Kathmandu it is a very primitive world, much as it was eighty years ago.
I first met Lela when I went to Nepal as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996. She was from a local village. Sweet and very shy, she tended to erupt in fits of giggles whenever the spotlight focused on her. She had an equivalent of a third grade education, like many of her peers. Seventy-two of the women in Nepal are illiterate. Lela and another woman took the first group of children in need of cleft palate surgery and their guardians to the hospital. It took the small group of twelve people seventeen hours in an old bus over tiny mountain roads to arrive at the hospital. One father carried his three-year old daughter for three days to meet the bus to begin the journey with the others. Another child came with her grandmother who wore a pair of plastic flip flops on her feet.
posted by Article-Buzz at 2:03 AM
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