First Aid and Filmmaking

After a tumultuous three and a half weeks of visiting children’s homes, dodging rhinoceroses, scouting the India-Nepali border, staying in three towns, playing soccer with street children, and maneuvering the tangled streets of Kathmandu, everyone on our small vision team has fallen in love with this country.

Now that phase one of this sojourn has come and passed, it is time for us to move on to the second aspect of our time here: independent projects.

John, the founder and president of Tiny Hands International, surprised our team with an (extremely) early breakfast visit and sparked a discussion of each of our passions and hopes for the remaining two weeks in Nepal, and we all brainstormed potential ideas for ourselves. Then John took our messy, poorly articulated thoughts and streamlined them into concretized projects.

I am involved in two of these ideas.

The first one is with Mike, and we will be doing what we love to do: filmmaking. John has asked us to make short documentaries of each child at each of the children’s homes. So we get to experience the extreme joy of returning to all eight children’s homes, and getting interviews with and footage of all one hundred children to make little films to send to each of the children’s sponsors in America. This is a time-consuming, but incredibly fun project. The kids love being on camera and playing with us, and we love filming and playing with them, so it’s a pretty perfect fit for us.

The second project is with Ben, and it’s a bit less tangible and a lot less smiley. We are in charge of doing research on medical outreach programs, so that Tiny Hands can decide whether to move forward with its medical branch of the Dream Center or not. So Ben has been contacting his friends in hospitals all over Kathmandu as well as discussing the difficulties we’d face here with Dipen, a Tiny Hands staff member who has been doing his own research. It looks like Ben and I will be working with the Ministry of Public Health to try and get some information about the type of medical care the Nepali government has in place. We also will be meeting with local non-government organizations that specialize in medical outreach to see what ideas have worked and have not worked for them. It looks like we may also be trekking with an NGO into some remote areas of Nepal to assess the medical needs of remote communities.

The next two weeks look very interesting, and the contrast of playing with some of the world’s most beautiful children while reflecting on the intense lack of medical care in rural and urban areas of Nepal is a wonderful task that will ground me in the reasons I decided to come here.