I joined my office at Nepal Rastra Bank, the central bank of Nepal, right on the next day as I had tightly used up my granted leave during my study. The following days became gradually normal and life started setting in. One thing, however, was incomplete yet: I didn’t have chance to visit my birth place which was about four hundred kilometers away from where I was then living. This came true on April 8, 2011 and we all four again headed down towards western part of the country, a region where all development indicators are well below the national average and yet in a country which has already registered its name under the category of world’s least developed countries.
The portrait of my village, called Sewar Bangaun in Dang district, was brilliantly attached to my head with every topography in subtle memory. I was pretty excited to see all those back again after a long while. After reaching the village, however, the virtual picture in the mind momentarily changed into a nightmarish reality when I confronted the ground reality. I had an expectation that the village must have achieved noticeable prosperity since the time I left it in August 2003, but I found that the things had become even worse. This village nurtured my entire childhood and, most importantly, gave me a high school degree and had opened up the avenue for my further study far away from home but it was truly frustrating that the village itself couldn’t get chance to change its own appearance since then. In particular, the dilapidated school building, of which every nook and corner are still in my vivid memory, trembled my heart when I saw its roof leaking and window bars mostly broken. Traveling around the village it was hard to find young individuals because most of them had been to Middle East or South East Asia as working migrants seeking their better life in their families back home.
My acute curiosity was not much with village geography and the people I did not know much due to a long absence but I was desperate to meet the people with whom I had spent most exciting moments back then in my childhood. I was able to find some but my particular interest was with Chamre, a nickname meaning sturdy (his true name was Bishnu Prasad Nepali but all used to call him Chamre), who remained very close to me during most part of my childhood life. I remember the moments when he never learned to be defeated. No one could dare to surpass him when directing a ball to the goal post in after-school succor games, played with a ball made from discarded garments tightly tied together inside a sock. A moment when he won my Nepali Rupees (NRs) fifty, equivalent to about five-day full wage then, in a game called Khopi (a bunch of coins are thrown from a distance into a hole and the opponent gives a choice to hit a particular coin left outside the hole, if any, from a distance with a larger coin without touching others to win the bid amount) has never vanished off my head as I had received harshest punishment ever in my life that evening at home. During my visit this time, I found that he was living in a most destitute condition which led to a pressing question in my mind asking why such a brilliant boy had to be deprived of the decent life he deserved to live. Shortly, I was sure enough to conclude that one event during that time led to a dramatic turn in his life: his father decided to take him out from school to support his family profession. His father was a tailor from lower caste family and this family was living on meager earnings that this profession was generating from services provided to village dwellers. His business was in constant threat from structural change that was taking place in his surroundings. People were switching from conventional designs available at Chamre’s home to the flourishing modern tailoring services offered by the tailors in neighboring city center. At one point, the extending bellies of the children forced Chamre’s father in an acute problem of bringing food on table everyday and left him no options other than to drop Chamre from school as being failure to afford school fees and decided to receive Chamre’s helping hands to support his profession. Chamre’s life started heading down the hill since then.
What made Chamre’s life fall into such a miserable condition? The lack of his father’s enough and regular source of income. His father would have certainly sent him to school had he been assured of constant flow of NRs twenty a month during that time to pay his tuition fee, equivalent to nearly one and half US dollar then. I was lucky enough on that part to have been born in a lower middle income family, thanks to my father’s regular source of income, which in fact helped me complete my high school very smoothly and also opened avenues for my career in the future as well.
After returning from the village, a sense of responsibility kept me knocking down all the time which forced me to feel an urgent need of doing something for those who are lagging behind and who did not have the same opportunity as I did. While continuing job with the bank, I started studying prominent books on development economics, including Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, White Man’s Burden by William Easterly, End of Poverty by Jaffery Sachs, Portfolios of the Poor by Darin Collins et al., to name a few, with highlighted marks all over the text to pin down every dimensions of poverty these books are trying to address. All of these readings along with my personal experience to have seen poverty from very close during my childhood led me to the conclusion that poor deserve regular source of income through steady jobs so that they wouldn’t have to worry about their children’s smooth development ahead, not like the situation Chamre’s father had to confront. I submitted my resignation to my employer in December 2012 and started conceptualize an institution here in Canada with an objective of raising the agenda of alleviating poverty through good job creation with the global audiences while focusing the operation in marginalized communities in every country in the world, which finally led to the birth of this organization.