What's New?May, 2008
-In
April, representatives of the Omprakash Foundation visited the Webb School in Bell Buckle, Tennessee. Community
visits such as this one are meant to help introduce potential volunteers and fundraisers to this website. We hope that
these presentations will allow us to continue expanding our network and building relationships between different communities
around the world. To learn more, please click here. -We recently donated $1000 to Neary Khmer (our health-education partner in Cambodia) for
water and sanitation education and the purchase and delivery of 90 water filters to their target villages in Khnong
Phnom commune. These villages are located high on a mountain in Siem Reap province and are isolated from markets and reliable
water sources. To learn more about Neary Khmer and the filters they distribute, click here.-We are currently arranging for 100,000 books to be delivered to schools and libraries
throughout India in the summer of 2008. The books will be donated to the Omprakash Foundation from Thrift
Recycling Management ( www.thriftrecycling.com), and Omprakash will pay for the shipping costs to transport books to a warehouse in Delhi. In total, each book
will cost about ten cents to deliver from the US to India. From there, representatives and partners of Omprakash will
help distribute these books to the dozens of educational projects that have requested them. The books will be in
English, and intended for children grades 0-6. They will be screened in the U.S. for culturally-appropriate material. Organizations
that will be receiving and helping to re-distribute books include ASHA ( www.ashanet.org), LHA ( www.lhaindia.org), and COVA ( www.covanetwork.org). To learn more about this project, click here. -Construction of a new library, funded by the Omprakash Foundation, is almost finished at the Golok
Sengcham Drukmo Home for Girls in rural Tibet (Qinghai Province, China). We recently arranged for books to be donated
to this library by Benchmark Education ( www.benchmarkeducation.com). On January 3rd, 2008, we transferred $2,500 to this project to begin paying for the yearly salaries of its three
teachers and one headmaster. Going forward, we hope to continue supporting this project with books, funds,
and volunteers. To learn more about this project, click here.-In December, we donated $3,034 to support the educational work of Health-Inc. ( http://www.health-inc.org) in Ladakh, India. This money was used to install electricity at one of the government schools that Health-Inc.
supports, and also to print books that Health-Inc. has designed and distributed to schools as part of its Love2Read program.
We are also thrilled to have begun posting some of Health-Inc.'s books on our website so that other educational projects
can develop curricular materials based on Health-Inc.'s innovative model. To see these books, please check out our
new Educational Resources page. To learn more about our relationship with Health-Inc., please click here. -We are seeing progress with our "school lunches" program at a village school in the Lubangwe
area of rural Zimbabwe. A representative of the Abercrombie and Kent Global Foundation ( www.akglobalfoundation.org), a reputable foundation with an office in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, us assisting us in this project. Together,
we will work to enable the school to provide a daily meal for nearly 200 children in this drought-stricken area.
Click here to learn more about this project. -Our network of volunteer opportunities continues to expand, and we hope
to direct volunteers towards these needy projects as soon as possible. Newest additions to our database are in
Liberia, Peru, Cambodia, Thailand, Zambia, India, the Philippines, and Nepal. Click here to read about these opportunities. We are raising money and working out logistics to begin supporting the
following projects as soon as possible:
-We want to continue raising money
to support the Amy Biehl Foundation's new after-school center in Guguletu Township near Cape Town, South Africa.
Please click here to learn more about this project. -The Louisiana-Himalaya Association ( www.lhaindia.org), our partner organization based in Dharamsala, India, is working to purchase a new building from which they can run their
school and community-center. The purchase of this building will make LHA totally self-sufficient. We hope to raise
funds to help pay for this building. Please click here to learn more about our relationship with LHA. Please scroll down to read about projects that we have already
begun to support.
Donations Made by the Omprakash Foundation
February-April 2005
$337 to help three different Tibetan
refugees cover health and immigration fees.
$442 to pay one-year college tuition
for Indian student.
$400 to buy a water-cooler and purifier for the Mother Teresa Home for the Dying and
Destitute in Delhi.
June 2005
$1038 to pay eye surgery for Tibetan monk
who otherwise would have lost his vision.
$400 to buy needed mattresses for the Mother Teresa
Home for the Dying and Destitute in Delhi.
$507 to pay the year's rent for the LHA medical-treatment
room in Dharamsala.
July 2005
$292 to ship eighty pounds of donated paperback
books to the LHA library in Dharamsala.
May 2006
$300 to subsidize facial
surgery for Indian man in Dharamsala.
June 2006
$222 to pay embassy fees
for Tibetan monk in Kathmandu.
August 2006
$6000 to establish Vocational
Carpentry Class at a vocational secondary school near Lhasa, Tibet.
-Bought 39 tools and paid six-month salary for two teachers. The class is currently being taken by 58 students.
The classroom is a functioning workshop that gives its students a marketable skill, provides a service to the local agrarian
community, and also raises money that the school can use to pay scholarships for poor students.
-We are hoping to raise more money so that we can continue to support this project. Due to growing attendance,
this vocational school is also planning to build a new dormitory to host 100 more students. We hope to endorse
this effort as much as possible.
September 2006
$5000 to construct
new classroom building at a small primary school near Aba, Tibet (Sichuan Province, China).
March 2007
$500 to support
the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)-- an organization that promotes women's literacy
and empowerment in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Sixty-five dollars is enough to hire one teacher for a month. Check
out www.rawa.org and www.afghanwomensmission.org
May 2007
$6435
to support construction of a library at the Golok Sengcham Drukmo Home for Girls, located in the Golok region of Qinghai Province
in China (Tibet). Established in 2006, the Golok Sengcham Drukmo Home for Girls is a privately-funded branch of the
local government school, and aims to give special attention and support to underprivileged girls. The library that we
are supporting (construction began on June 7, 2007) will be open to all students at the government school, and to other community
members as well. To learn more about this project, click here or visit www.trahelpsgirls.blogspot.com.
June 2007
$3160 to purchase one year's worth of school materials (stationery and teaching reference books) for the 445 students
at RAWA's nine orphanages in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
$1850 to purchase one year's worth of school materials (stationery, textbooks, and teaching reference books) for the 58
students at a RAWA school for Afghan refugees located in Peshawar, Pakistan.
To learn more about these donations, click here or visit www.rawa.org/orphanages.htm or www.afghanwomensmission.org/programs/orph/.
October 2007
$8,804.70 to Project Why (www.projectwhy.org) to cover all expenses for one year at two schools in the slums of Delhi, India.
A total of 177 students attend these two schools. Please click here to see detailed budgets for these two schools, and to learn more about our involvement
with Project Why. Please note: due to banking fees, the sum $8,804.70 is slightly higher than the actual operating
costs of the two schools.
$10,000 to the Amy Biehl Foundation
to help pay for a new after-school center in the Thandoluntu area in the township of Guguletu, near Cape Town, South
Africa. The center's operating costs, estimated to be about $25,000, annually, include co-ordinator and teacher
salaries, learning materials, and food and transport for students. Please click here to learn more about our involvement with the Amy Biehl Foundation.
November,
2007
$539 to begin supporting a school-lunches
program in the impoverished area of Lubangwe, Zimbabwe. Working with a representative from the A&K Global
Foundation (http://www.akglobalfoundation.org), we hope to provide families with staple food supplies and enable the village
school to guarantee a nutritious meal for every child every day. Please click here to learn more about this project.
$6,000 to support the new Women's Center at Project Why (www.projectwhy.org) in New Delhi, India. This money will cover all operating costs for 6 months.
Please click here to learn more about our involvement with Project Why.
$2,000 to enable Neary Khmer, a health-education NGO in Cambodia, to purchase 200 water filters and distribute them in the
village of Kok Daung. Please click here to learn more about Neary Khmer.
December, 2007
$900 (IRS 35,000) to pay for electrification of the Domkhar learning center in Domkhar Dho, Sham, Ladakh (north India).
The Domkhar learning center is supported by Health-Inc. (www.health-inc.org) and educates 120 students from pre-primary to Grade 12. It is
one of the locations where Health-Inc. is implementing its innovative Love2Read program, featuring curricular materials designed
for cultural relevance and printed in the Ladakhi language.
$2,134 (IRS 82,500) to pay a Ladakhi publisher to print books designed by Health-Inc. to be distributed to Ladakhi schools
involved in its Love2Read program. To learn more about the partnership between Health-Inc. and the Omprakash Foundation,
please click here.
January, 2008
$2,500 towards paying annual salaries for the three teachers and one headmaster at the Golok Sengcham Drukmo Home for Girls
in the Golok region of Tibet (Qinghai Province, China). To learn more about this project, click here.
February, 2008
$1,000
to Neary Khmer for the purchase and distribution of 90 home water filters to poor villagers in Khnong Phnom Commune, Siem
Reap, Cambodia. To learn more about the project, click here.
March, 2008
$200 to Xom Dua (Vietnam) to enable 30 children
to receive daily lunch for an entire month and to pay two teachers' salaries at the Nha Trang school. Click here to learn more.
April, 2008
$40
to buy books for Helping Hands school in Cusco, Peru. Click here to learn more about Helping Hands and to see photos of the purchased books.
May, 2008
$300 to buy art supplies for Helping Hands school in Cusco, Peru.
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| New classroom building at primary school near Aba, Tibet, paid for by the Omprakash Foundation. |
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Please click here to read our latest newsletter or review past newsletters.
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| Child in Lubangwe, Zimbabwe |
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| Students at the Golok Sengcham Drukmo Home for Girls in Tibet. |
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| Student at one of the Amy Biehl Foundation's after-school programs in Cape Town. |
History
Before going to college, we took a year "on" and went to India for three
months. We returned home with a raised awareness of how much material wealth surrounds us, and how little it takes to
change someone's world. As volunteer English teachers at a small school in Dharamsala, we had learned the power
of "connecting the dots": administrated by the Louisiana-Himalaya Association (www.lhainfo.org), this school was a hub of different community service projects, all driven by volunteers from India, Tibet, Europe
and the U.S. When we left Dharamsala and traveled to other parts of India, we came upon schools, health clinics, and
seemingly endless other projects that we wanted to support. On our last day in India, we volunteered at the Mother Teresa
Home for the Dying and Destitute in Delhi, where six nuns care for three-hundred physically and mentally disabled residents.
There, we met Omprakash: an old gentleman who had been living in the home ever since suffering a severe stroke thirty years
earlier. The living conditions at the home were far from what we would call ideal, but Omprakash told us that he
felt like he was in paradise, simply because the nuns had been so kind to him.
This
comment put us over the edge. The human capacity to ameliorate suffering--both within others, and within themselves-- had
never been so apparent. It seemed all too obvious that we could easily support the impressive projects
we had seen by simply connecting the dots back to our privileged American communities. At the same time, by letting
the voices of people like Omprakash resonate amongst our friends and families, we could share the sense of humility and
gratitude that this man inspired in us. So, with LHA as our inspiration, we returned to the U.S. and started writing
letters.
The generosity of our donors has enabled us to support a variety of causes, a full account of
which can be found below. Soon after we began raising and donating money, we decided to focus primarily on projects
involving education. A six-week research trip in Tibet, graciously funded by grants acquired through Johns
Hopkins University and Bowdoin College, enabled us to visit over twenty different schools during the summer of 2006.
This field research, complemented by continuing travel experiences, reading, and endless email communications, informs our
ongoing process of deciding what projects to support. Rather than bind ourselves to a single, inflexible mission, we
aim to continue allowing our decisions to be guided by the human relationships that we and our partners forge while traveling
abroad.
In addition to bringing money and material resources to schools in India, Tibet, Pakistan, and beyond,
we are also working to connect the dots by directing volunteers towards schools around the world that have expressed the need
for native English speakers to help teach English. We do not offer any sort of guide service that will escort travelers
to and from their volunteer opportunities. Rather, we offer our advice and encouragement to young Americans looking
to broaden their perspectives by entering a foreign community and forging relationships without the filter of an organized
travel group. We strongly believe that this effort of ours will be eye-opening and intensely educational for both American
volunteers and the foreign communities that they will serve.
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| Beneficiaries of Neary Khmer in Cambodia. |
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| Construction of library at the Golok Sengcham Drukmo Home for Girls in Tibet. |
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| Greenhouse at vocational school near Lhasa, Tibet. |
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| Students at primary school near Aba, Tibet. |
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| Plans for expansion of a secondary school in Tibet. |
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