Project for a Village

A journey to Nepal

By Leah Etling on Mar 27, 2015 in Giving, People

Yardi CSD manager Terry Kelly and his wife Pam took the trip of a lifetime to Nepal this spring, but they weren’t on a typical tourist agenda. Instead, the focus of their visit was to volunteer at a pop-up health clinic, called a Health Camp, in the foothills of the Himalayas.

The two-day medical outreach was organized by Project for a Village, a non-profit started by Kathy and Rene Perez-Silva. Terry Kelly and Rene Perez-Silva attended college together at Georgetown, and since the couple began their trips to Nepal four years ago, the Kellys were interested in lending a hand. After 22 hours of flight time (including 5 layovers) and wrangling 400 pounds of luggage that included medical supplies, they arrived in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital.

“We carried over 250 pounds of vitamins and de-worming pills to distribute to the mothers of the small children (enough vitamins for a year’s supply for each child). We also took multiple duffel bags full of essential medicines to treat the common complaints,” Terry Kelly explained. Prenatal vitamins and a health outreach project focused on preteen girls were also distributed.

“Many Nepali people become dependent on foreign aid groups coming to their village to provide free doctors and medicine through health camps,” Kathy Perez-Silva relates in the Project for a Village blog. “The shortage of doctors is severe and the pay is so low that most of the doctors want to leave Nepal after they finish school to work in the West.”

During the two days of clinic visits, 1,000 people were treated by 16 doctors, with assistance from nurses and translators. Many of the ailments were routine, including aches and pains from physical labor in the fields, and digestive discomfort connected to poor nutrition and spicy food. Up to 80 percent of Nepalese depend on subsistence farming to survive.

While the doctors saw as many patients as possible, Pam Kelly organized crowd control for waiting patients and Terry set up a diversion for children waiting for their parents to be seen – teaching them how to play Frisbee.

“The kids are something special, they make incredible eye contact and have no blocks on the pathway to their hearts and souls – they have not learned cynicism. I think the reason so many Westerners keep going back to Nepal is the beauty of the people, you just WANT to help them,” Terry Kelly said.

Their trip also included visits to many Hindu and Buddhist holy sites in Kathmandu and Pokhara, the country’s second largest city.

“We also had the privilege of touring the Kanti Children’s Hospital in Kathmandu which is the main government sponsored facility for poor children. We also toured an orphanage which housed 30 young girls who had been rescued from a life of servitude after having been sold by their families,” Terry Kelly said.

The Project for a Village blog offers a compelling account of the many risks and challenges involved in attempting a grassroots humanitarian project like this one. Below, Terry Kelly shared a few of his photographs from the trip with us, and you can see many more on the project website.

To support Project for a Village’s efforts in Nepal, visit their donation page.