In The New York Times Magazine this weekend, Nick Kristof has a story examining what he calls “D.I.Y. Foreign Aid” — what he says is the emerging trend of individuals creating their own philanthropies and setting out to change one small part of the world.

A striking percentage of these D.I.Y. entrepreneurs are women, he notes, and they seem likely to choose causes that better the lives of women and girls. Nick has long saidthat by helping women and children we can save the world, and the examples in his article are powerful.

One who particularly caught my attention was Maggie Doyne, who left on what was supposed to be a gap year in Australia and Fiji five years ago, when she was 19. After Australia, she added a semester at an Indian orphanage to her plans and eventually wound up in Nepal, which she first visited with a young refugee she met in India. I’ll let Nick tell you the rest of the story:

It was a gorgeous Himalayan village, with a river running through it. But it was also ravaged by the war. Temples had been burned down, and the girl’s home had been converted into a rebel camp. Most children couldn’t afford school. In the cities, she had seen them working with hammers, breaking rocks into gravel to sell.

“The first little girl I met was Hema,” Doyne remembers. Then 6 or 7 years old (few children know their precise age), Hema spent her time breaking rocks and scavenging garbage and had no chance to go to school. But she was radiant and adorable and always greeted Doyne in Nepali with a warm, “Good morning, Sister!”

“Maybe I saw a piece of myself in her,” said Doyne, who decided to take Hema under her wing and pay for her education: “I knew I couldn’t do anything about a million orphans, but what if I started with this girl?” So she took Hema to school and paid $7 for the girl’s school fees and another $8 for a uniform so that she could enter kindergarten.

“It became addictive,” Doyne said. “I said, if I can help one girl, why not 5? Why not 10? And along with scholarships, they needed the most basic things: food, shelter, clothing.” Doyne found a ramshackle telephone “booth” — actually, a mud hut — where she could place an international call and telephoned her parents with a strange and urgent request: Can you wire me the money in my savings account? Doyne’s parents were concerned about the choices she was making and the delay in going to college, but it was her money — $5,000 made baby-sitting while in high school — and they could hear the passion in her voice over a crackly line.

Her parents sent her the money. Doyne has since raised hundreds of thousands more. With it she has built the Kopila Valley Children’s Home. As Nick describes it:

The school opened with 220 students and will soon expand to 300. The plan is to offer health care and dental care as well, starting with deworming the children — because their load of intestinal worms leaves them anemic. A $300 donation covers a child’s educational costs for a year at the school, including health and dental care. Doyne is also working on a vocational element, training kids to raise livestock for a living, to repair bicycles or to develop other skills that will give them steady incomes. The school is coed, but the girls who attend are particularly important to Doyne, for two reasons. One is that uneducated girls are particularly at risk of exploitation. The other is that there’s considerable evidence that educating girls is one of the best investments available in the developing world, because it leads to lower birth rates and a more skilled and productive labor force.

As for her own needs, Doyne is blasé. When she had an infected tooth in a remote village far from any doctor, and her face swelled up so that she couldn’t even see, a local man obligingly took a chisel and pliers and pulled the tooth — without any painkiller. Regarding education, Doyne is thinking about earning a college degree by correspondence someday (my hunch is that she’ll have an honorary doctorate before she has a B.A.). Listening to her chatter about her shelter and school, describing her hopes to replicate her model in other countries, it’s easy to forget something quite extraordinary: she’s still only 23.

I read the piece and, as Nick probably intended, I wanted to write a check. (You can find a list of ways to change the world, with donations of money or time, here.)

I also wanted to speak to Doyne’s parents. What were their thoughts as their daughter created a life so far from home and so different from what they expected? It seems I’m not the only one who wondered about this. A few hours after the article was posted on nytimes.com earlier this week, I got an e-mail from a reader, Amrit Singh:

What blew me away was the idea of parents’ honoring their child’s independence even while the child was traveling through dangerous areas, getting her infected tooth pulled out with pliers, building her school and raising money on her own (all at an age where most young adults are still tethered to the umbilical cord). How did the parents manage this feat?! How did they manage to raise a child who is so self-sufficient and capable? I wonder what it was like for them to have their child buck the trend of “high achiever goes to top tier college” and cope with the uncertainty of the child’s choices. In fact, I would love to hear more from the parents’ perspective about this, because I think that as significant as their daughter’s achievements are, the parents’ achievements are even more intriguing. As a person, I was inspired by Maggie. As a parent, I was inspired by her parents.

As it turns out, Steve and Nancy Doyne know a little about defying other people’s expectations, her father explained in a phone interview. The day Maggie was born, Steve quit his job managing a natural-food store in Philadelphia and became a stay-at-home-dad to Maggie; her older sister, Kate, and eventually her younger sister, Libby. Nancy, in turn, went into real estate and became the family breadwinner. That was not something fathers did back then in the affluent town of Moorestown, N.J. (neither were home births, which is how all three girls came into the world.) Gap years weren’t the norm, either, when Kate decided to take one, heading off with the organization Leapnow.org to the South Pacific before enrolling at Prescott College.

Maggie, whom her father describes as “a Type A personality,” thought that she too would go to college, as her sister did, and “be this career person, like my wife,” Steve says. But by the spring of her senior year, he says, “she was burned out” by all it took to stay on that path — “three varsity sports, editor of the yearbook, class officer.”

So Maggie, too, took a gap year. Like Kate, she went to the South Pacific for one semester but then announced she wanted to spend the second one doing an internship in India. Leapnow.org placed her at a children’s home in the northern part of the country, which made her father nervous. “She started out with a group,” he says of his expectations when he agreed to the first half of the gap year, “but now she was mostly on her own,” he says of the second half.

He worried more when he did not hear from her for her first week in India and even more when he learned the reason. It was an eight-hour drive from Delhi to her destination, and along the way “there were children begging in the streets,” Steve says. “That really affected Maggie. She broke down and didn’t leave her room for the first weekend, she spent three or four days in her room. The children pulled her out of it, and after that she was fine, but it was hard to have her so far away and not be able to help her.”

In the months that followed, Maggie called home periodically to ask for advice. The woman who ran the home would leave town, placing Maggie in charge for weeks at a time, meaning she was responsible for the 50 orphans who lived at the home and the 160 children who went to school there. Her calls home were also peppered with stories of the Nepalese refugees who had flooded the town, to escape the fighting back home, and she marveled at the fact that conditions in her tiny, impoverished village — where the refugees lived out in the elements, under plastic tarps — were actually better than their alternative back in Nepal.

Eventually she called to say there was a cease-fire in Nepal and that she and a refugee who had become a friend — a 16-year-old girl — were heading across the border together so Maggie could see life there for herself. Her father took that call while standing in the family’s den, and “I walked around that pool table a thousand times asking her every question I could think of,” he remembers. “She had a plan, and she assured me she was safe. She wasn’t really asking my permission.”

A few weeks later she called again and asked her parents to wire the $5,000 she had saved during years of baby-sitting. That was the money she used to start her school. “She wanted to replicate the situation she was in in India, but she wanted to do it right,” her father says. “She wanted to create a model for orphans based on a loving home.”

And she has. Nancy Doyne visited the new home last December. Steve plans to go for the first time this December. In the meantime they keep in touch with e-mail and Skype, when the grid is working on Maggie’s end.

Her parents have accepted the fact that Maggie’s life is now in Nepal. And they are proud of her. But there is also some sadness. Says Steve:

As a parent you think of your children going to college, graduating, having a career, marriage, children. Maggie is the legal guardian for 30 children. She’s their mother. Who is going to marry a young woman who is responsible for 30 children? Her life is not going to be a normal typical life. On some level you go through a mourning process for that as a parent.

Other people either glorify this or they are harsh about it. There are people in our very wealthy, well-to-do town who are appalled that we would permit her to do this. But she is an adult. This is who she is. This is what she was born to do.

Source:  

http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/22/when-a-child-moves-to-nepal/