Gap year encounter in Nepal that changed an American teen’s life, and the lives she has changed there since by helping rural poor
- When American Maggie Doyne met six-year-old Nepali girl Hima in 2007, she felt an urge to help her and her fellow villagers overcome poverty
- Her life savings became seed money to found a home for poor children, then a school, a women’s centre, farm and refuge for at-risk girls
While trekking in the far west of Nepal in 2007, Maggie Doyne – then a fresh-faced teenager from Mendham, in the US state of New Jersey – came across a scrawny child breaking rocks with a hammer in a dry riverbed. The girl looked up and her face broke into a broad smile. “Namaste, didi,” the girl said.
“The whole focus of my life changed in that one second,” says Doyne, who has since set in motion a series of minor miracles in one of the poorest parts of one of the world’s poorest countries.
Doyne befriended the six-year-old, called Hima, ploughed all her savings into setting up a home for similarly impoverished children, and – before she realised it – changed her entire existence.
There’s also a women’s centre, which provides vocational training, a clinic, an organic farm and a refuge for at-risk girls. That’s no mean achievement for someone who embarked on her quest a few months short of her 20th birthday.
“I never imagined I’d be doing this, not in my wildest dreams,” says Doyne, now 33. “I had never really left New Jersey and was planning on going to college, but at the last moment I decided to take a gap year to travel the world. I started off in the South Pacific islands, and ended up in northern India working with refugee children who had fled the civil war in Nepal.”
