Coming from Nakote, one of the villages in Helambu, Jimmy was educated in the small but very forward Yangrima Boarding School in Sermathang. This school, Jimmy believes, has a large role to play in who he is and what he has achieved. [break]
“When I look back now, my time there must have been formative for me to link myself back to my community,” Jimmy says. And he has given back to his community in such a large way.
By founding Helambu Education and Livelihood Project (HELP) in 2009, Jimmy has already helped in building 24 classrooms in 14 schools across the region.
This vision came about almost accidently and the story of how he got to where is now started with a different organization. Jimmy passed his SLC with first division and joined New Summit College in Kathmandu for his 10+2.
But the school that he owed so much to was bombed by Maoists during the insurgency. “It gave us a lot of pain, but it also inspired us to do something,” Jimmy says and explains it was this way of thinking that led over 20 ex students to establish Yangrima Ex-Students Society (YESS) in 2000.
“The idea behind YESS was to rebuild our school,” Jimmy says and so at 17, he was already one of the founders for an NGO that he helped register and was the president of from 2003-2007.
Though running an organization may not sound like fun to most teenagers, Jimmy laughs and says, “You forget all your other priorities and you think it’s the coolest thing you can do, sometimes for young people to be responsible they need authority. Holding a position gives you authority and makes you think you have to be responsible and you get things done.”
He also believes he was quite lucky in being able to work with some of his closest friends from his childhood, “I don’t remember many Saturdays where we weren’t doing something. We’d hang out and have ‘meetings’ but end up talking – it was fun!”
In his own life Jimmy left Nepal for the first time at 19 and participated in International Student Festival in Trondheim (ISFIT) in Norway. “It’s a fantastic forum for young people and when I came back I really saw how globalized the world is and the phase ‘think globally act locally’ become more real to me”.
Motivated by ISFIT, Jimmy wanted to something more than just studying as he thought getting a degree, at the end of the day, he’d only get a piece of paper, “So I spent more than half my time dedicated to YESS,” he reveals.
“When I was in college I was interested in learning from more than just textbooks, I always thought you could do more,” he says and so while obtaining his Bachelors degree at Nepal College of Travel and Tourism Management, Kalimati, he took up on other opportunities and it was drive that led him to win the ISC Wings of Excellence Award essay competition at St Gallen University, Switzerland, in 2006.
Besides that Jimmy attended Harvard Conference in Shangai in 2004, and he took a short course on “China and India Development and Relationship” at Harvard University in 2007.
In 2006, he took a position as a Nepal Representative for International Teachers Association, Denmark and in the same year he joined Children of the Earth and is now volunteering as its Chapter Leader in Nepal.
Always broadening his horizons, Jimmy worked for MondoChallenge Foundation, UK, a charity that works in international development in 2008 as project manager for Asia, Nepal, India and Sri Lanka and is currently working as the Nepal Director.
Even with his extensive traveling around the world and learning, he would always end up back home. “In 2007 I took a group of friends on a tour of Helambu and what I saw was very touching. What I had in 1997 was so much better than what students had in 2007, and I started thinking maybe there was a way to incorporate these kids into a larger vision and that’s how the idea behind HELP happened.”
YESS was able to reopen Yangrima in 2009 and another village asked Jimmy to help build a school. Jimmy worked with the village to calculate and raise funds but after slow progress he didn’t think it was an efficient use of time and resources. “Therefore, I approached MondoChallenge Foundation and we did a need analysis, made a proposal, and received funds to help 10 more schools.”
And help the schools is exactly what he does, “The idea is very simple – we only support community based government schools because we don’t want a private school competing. There’s already so much resources going to waste, and we want the community to get involved. This means we don’t build one perfect impeccable school, but we improve on what’s already there.”
From 2009, HELP has been building classrooms, funding additional teacher’s salary, creating libraries, providing desks, benches, books sponsorship, scholarship and sponsorship and volunteer placements.
But to Jimmy, this isn’t enough, “I think change is possible, we don’t have to wait for anyone. I would be interested to form a like-minded group from across Nepal so we could build fantastic self sustaining projects together. I really believe in the power of people, I’d like to replicate HELP’s model elsewhere and do the same thing in other areas like livelihood and setting up a business in villages.”
Though Jimmy has accomplished so much, he believes there to more to done in Nepal. In his words, “Just educating people isn’t enough; they need a way to make the people sustainable.”
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