Maggie Doyne, whose Kopila Valley Children´s Home and School located in Surkhet currently educates 210 children, heard kind words and got a one-year teacher´s visa from the Department of Immigration on Monday. [break]
“They said I am welcome in Nepal. It feels good. I feel like a Nepali now,” said Doyne who won US$ 100,000 at the DoSomething.org awards in 2009 for being an outstanding world-changer under the age of 25. “I am not here as an outsider," she told Republica in Kathmandu on Tuesday, adding that she wants to work with the people and government of Nepal to change the country for the better.
Before Monday, Doyne had heard immigration officials question her why she wanted a residential visa and why she wouldn´t go back to her own country. Some even suggested that she get married to a Nepali man to get a residential visa.
Since starting Kopila in spring 2008, Doyne had been shuttling between Nepal and the United States every four or five months to renew her five-month tourist visa. But now, she has the freedom to spend a full year in Nepal, and hopes that in the coming years, she might get visas for longer durations.
Setting standards in Surkhet
In just around three years since coming into operation, Kopila has set a standard for being the only school in Surkhet where students are not beaten.
“Teachers initially told me it was impossible to discipline students without beating them, especially because children at Kopila come from very poor backgrounds, and are dirty,” she said, recalling the days in 2008 when 300 teachers applied for teaching jobs at her school. Doyne told the applicants that if they didn´t know any other way to discipline students, then they weren´t meant for the school.
Teachers who were eventually selected tried to build a relationship with the students. Today, the students obey teachers not because they fear them, but because they love and respect them. The students have imbibed self-discipline.
Another practice that Kopila has started is engaging teachers with guardians of day-scholar students. Kopila runs classes from nursery to the sixth grade and houses 40 of the 210 students. Teachers get in touch with guardians in case a day scholar fails to show up at school.
Kopila provides lunch to all the students as that has proven to be a strong pull for children inclined to skip school. Kopila also runs a clinic as most children coming to the school do not have toilets and sanitation facilities at home. The clinic makes sure that infections do not spread, and a fresh entrant, who might be an orphan, a child laborer, or a child begging on the streets, gets enough medical attention before being fit to attend classes.
Thanks to these practices and the fact that the school has an American principal in the form of Doyne, Kopila receives a flurry of requests every day from parents who want their children enrolled there.
“I tell them their children have parents to take care of them, while my children don´t have anyone,” Doyne said. That´s the criterion Kopila has set for accepting children. It only takes takes children who don´t have a reliable guardian to ensure an education.
The lady who came to Nepal five years ago during a gap year after high school and couldn´t go back after seeing Nepali children living in miserable circumstances, said she is committed for life to ensuring a future for the children at her school. The commitment is a shock for many of her friends in New Jersey who believed she would complete her further studies and build a career back in the United States.
“I was a very happy teenager,” said Doyne, adding that what she is doing today is the least of what she and her friends and family expected her to end up doing.
Sponsor for every child
Every child studying at Kopila has a sponsor, including American, British and Nepali nationals.
“In Nepal, you can do a lot for a child with very little money,” said Doyne who believes all Nepali children are her own children and therefore all of them have to have the same opportunities.
Kopila´s monthly running expense is Rs 600,000, of which half is spent on food, as Doyne wants to ensure a very good diet to her children.
The smiling theist, who admitted to being very sensitive, said there are days when things are simply overwhelming, making her wish she had rather not started the school.
“But at the end of the day, I realize I wouldn´t do anything else. I am really happy to be at Kopila,” she said.
The school´s management committee chairman Top Bahadur Malla, whose niece Sunita brought Doyne to Nepal for the first time, hopes the government will eventually grant Doyne visa for a longer duration as Doyne is planning to build a second and a third home to accommodate more needy children. Doyne built the first home on a piece of land bought with US $ 5,000 she saved babysitting during high school.
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