To our donors:
In line with our intention to stay as directly and personally involved with our projects as possible, two HVF board members, Greg Thoma and I, made a trip in December 2015 to Nepal to take a close look at our scholarship programs in the two villages there. (We traveled at our own expense).
We never could have foreseen what we encountered in Dhital and Kaskikot, the two villages where HVF provides private school scholarships for a total of 36 Dalit (untouchable caste) children. Each village school had prepared an elaborate, somewhat ceremonial, but thoroughly heartwarming reception for us. They treated us, as representatives of HVF and its donors, like heroes. In each case, the entire school was brought out into the schoolyard, where the neatly uniformed students sat in orderly rows on the grass, with principals, a few school patrons and the ‘heroic’ Westerners in chairs up front.



Then in each village we had private meetings with school principals and with the parents of those students we are sponsoring. To a person, we found them excited about and grateful for what our organization is doing for them and their villages. It was especially touching to see how enthusiastic the parents, many of them illiterate, were about the education their kids are receiving. Since hope must not be a commodity in very high supply among the lower castes in such poor villages in a very poor country, it was satisfying to realize that HVF has become, in part, a distributor of hope for better futures in these two small villages.
We came away from these visits with our faith in the worth of our scholarship programs not just confirmed but greatly enhanced. Principals, parents, teachers and villagers are our strong supporters. Of course, it’s a little hard to know what the kids themselves think, since they are only 4-6 years old, but they certainly seemed to be happy little campers at school the days we were there. And by the numbers–Nepali schools have rank-in-class figures even for 4-year-olds in the nursery class–our kids are doing very well. Quite a few are at or near the top of their class.

