Before committing to this trip, I had a bunch of phone and Skype calls with Don Messerschmidt, who is on the Gorkha Foundation Advisory Board, and with Foundation Chair Bijaya (BJ) Devkota. But it wasn’t until I took a train trip from Vermont to Washington DC and met BJ, that it got real for me.

We were supposed to hook up somewhere, but the Great January 2016 Blizzard stepped in and changed our plans. I had to get on the Metro to the end of the line and BJ had to drive in from his house to squeeze in a two hour meeting at a little Mexican fast-food place before the blizzard shut down the city.

I didn’t know what or who to expect. Check out the Gorkha Foundation website (http://GorkhaFoundation.org) and you will be hard pressed to find a photo of this modest guy. For BJ, it is all about getting good things to happen in Gorkha – his homeland and the place where he learned his values from his father – without a trace of self-promotion.

BJ has lived in the States ever since college. He has a demanding day job as IT officer for a suburban school district outside DC.  He has a three-hour commute, and then gets home to spend time with his little daughter before she goes to bed.  And somehow, somehow, he manages to run this surprisingly effective non-profit that is doing great work on the ground in remote parts of Gorkha District in the center of Nepal. Despite the 7,500 mile separation, he is doing it every day, intimately involved with what the Foundation is doing in Gorkha. No armchair Foundation Director here.

Here’s an anecdote that illustrates. BJ hooked up with another non-profit that donates high-quality medical equipment to developing countries. He went up to Connecticut to meet them. They said, “We’ll give you $250,000 worth of equipment to send to Gorkha, but you have raise $25,000 of that.” So BJ went home and threw a big party, invited everybody he knew, friends and colleagues, and served them burgers and beer, then hit them up for donations. He collected about $9,000. So he bundled all the individual donation checks, all made out to the other non-profit, not to the Gorkha Foundation, and delivered them. Not a penny went to the Gorkha Foundation itself. The other organization was so impressed – no partner had ever given them a stack of individual donation checks like this – that they said, “Close enough!” The Gorkha Foundation got the quarter million dollars worth of equipment and shipped it to Nepal, where it was put to use in rural hospitals and clinics in Gorkha.

Now that I have been in Gorkha for a month, working day to day with the full-time volunteer staff, I am seeing how this all-volunteer NGO is able to do so much with very little resources.

(This photo shows one of those ridgeline locations where the Foundation will be building a new school later this year.)

Please check out the Gorkha Foundation website (http://GorkhaFoundation.org). It tells this remarkable story better than I can. After all, I am seeing only the school reconstruction work, not all the other things the Foundation has been doing.

And PLEASE DONATE! The donation button is at the top right of each page of the Gorkha Foundation website.