I believe our generation is really going to [gonna] change things, and we're going to [gonna] create the world that we want to [wanna] live in. When I was about 18 years old, I was a student at Mendham High School, and I woke up one morning and realised that if I went to school right away I wouldn't be ready.
As much as I knew about, like, the outside world and learning and being a good student, I really realized that I didn't know a whole lot about myself.
[Song lyrics: "Dreams have never left her mind"]
I decided that I wanted to take a trip and do some service work around the world. And I joined a program called Leap Now and I set out on a gap year.
A lot of countries later, and still with my little backpack, I ended up getting a volunteer position at a school in India, in the northeast. I started to meet refugee families and refugee children. I got to know them, and really came to love them.
I asked a lot of questions about, why all of these kids were coming to India and fleeing their homes and their villages in the Himalayas. At the time, I didn't even know that Nepal was a country. There had been a civil war going on for about ten years.
Children had been orphan as a result of disease and war were fleeing the country in search for a better life in India. So many kids were coming into our project in India that I became really curious, and I decided that I really wanted to take a trip to Nepal.
I planed to travel with a friend of mine. She had left Nepal and her village about eight years earlier and had never returned. We got on a but for about two days and then we had to walk a couple of days through the Himalayan mountains.
I fell in love with this country, people really open up their hearts and I felt so much at home. At the same time it was the most eye opening experience, because I saw poverty and women and children in these situations that I just didn't even know existed in the world.
For the first time in my life I understood what it meant to be an orphan and what it looked like to live in a post war ravaged country. What amazed me the most was that these people still had hope.
[Song lyrics: "Dreams have never left her mind"]
I met a lot of children who had lost their entire families and were living on their own. I just fell in love with their grey eyes and their smiles.
[Song lyrics: "Time has flown, time has flown"]
Through my travels in Nepal I realised that there was something there for me to do. Soon after, I called up my parents and asked them to send me over my entire life savings. I was a babysitter growing up and I had saved about five thousand dollars from the time I was I don't know twelve or thirteen years old. After a very long conversation, my parents sent over my life savings and I bought a piece of land, on the outskirts of a really beautiful village, Just a really small piece.
My goal was to build a home for the children who didn't have anywhere to live and had lost their families. Children everywhere are the same. They want the same things, love, and education, and the ability to learn and friendship.
In the beginning I was really overwhelmed, Nepal is a country where the U.N estimates there is one million orphaned and abandoned children. That's a number that I couldn't even begin to grasp or understand. It overwhelmed me. I spent a lot of time just angry that I had spent my whole life growing up and not knowing what kind of poverty and sadness existed in the world.
But, I got over it when I met a young girl named Hima who was working and living on the side of a dry river bed, breaking stones for a living. And she would take big stones and boulders from this dry river, carry them up from the side of the river bed and break them into small pieces.
She would sell them at end of the day. She'd gather a big bag and she'd sell them for about a dollar. And she used that money to feed her family and take care of her younger siblings and her single mother.
And every day when I'd cross the river, she'd say "Namaste!" which means hello. And I thought, what if I just started with this one little girl, with this one child. What would happen if I put her into school? How would her life change if she became educated?
And I went, and I met a principal, I met local village leaders and local townspeople, and they all said the same thing: We want our children to be educated. But the problem is, we can't pay the money that it takes, and a lot of these kids need to support their families.
So I thought, I can put one child into school. I paid Hima's tuition and I got her a school uniform and a set of books. The admission fee was less than seven dollars. Okay, even though I'm only nineteen, I can do that. I started with just one child, and I put her into school and watched as her life was transformed.
The thing about this kind of work is that it gets really addicting after a while, and what started with one child soon became five and then ten and then twenty. I had this dream to build a home for the kids that not only needed a place to go to school every day and become educated, but didn't have food or a bed to sleep in, or a place that they could call home.
I didn't have any money left, and I went home. In the beginning, I think I was convinced I could keep babysitting and babysit my way to building Kopila Valley
I talked to people in my community. My high school, my middle school... Before I knew, it I had raised about twenty thousand dollars and I came back and I finished what would seen become Kopila Valley Children's Home.
So today, there is two hundred and twenty students enrolled in our program. They come every day. We have local teachers that come in and teach them how to read and write. There is a clinic where they get health care and their basic medical needs met. They get a nutritious meal every day at school.
Almost all of the two hundred and twenty kids that come everyday are the first of their family to become educated. When I come back to my community here in New Jersey and the U.S, I talk to students and to young people and I tell them "Hey look we can change the world If we don't like the things that we see... Anywhere we can change them"
I really love what I do. I'm in love with the children that I live with. They changed my live. They bring me the greatest joy. It's really hard work sometimes. There are days where I feel sad, but all I usually have to do is walk out my bedroom door and see thirty children running around and realise that hope and change and everything is happening right before my eyes and I see that in the faces of my children.
My main message has been to really follow our hearts and find what it is that we love to do and then bring that to the world. I think we all have something really special to give, And I've found that and I feel like It's my obligation now to teach young people that they can do the same thing. [ it ] Doesn't even mean that you have to move eight thousand miles away or go to a village in the middle of Nepal. There is so much to do everywhere around us if we just open up our eyes and start to see it.