Nepalese Canadian Network

In 2000, a Canadian woman by the name of Michèle Legault went to Nepal looking for great trekking adventures and beautiful landscapes. While she found what she was looking for in Nepal’s magnificent mountain ranges, she also discovered lasting friendships with her porters. During a visit to her new friends’ village in the Syauri Pangu region – in the Kavre District some 60 km South East of Kathmandu – she learned they were trying very hard, with no success, to bring clean water into their village. Michèle volunteered to help and this marked the beginning of a long relationship of support between the Canadian and Nepali people.

Since then, water has been brought to the village and in the past few years, still with the help of their Canadian friends, the villagers have also benefitted from educational, health, agricultural and economic advancements, providing a tremendous improvement to the villagers’ health and quality of life. A team of Canadians now works to raise awareness and funds for Nepal and a few of these volunteers fly to Nepal for a month or two each year to visit and evaluate the progress of their projects.

There are a number of ways people can get involved. ‘Twinning’ a Nepalese school with a Canadian school, for instance, is how Claude Martel, a grade one teacher at Saint-Barthélemy Elementary School, an international school in Montreal, chose to get involved. Martel not only teaches his young students about Nepal, he encourages them to write small books about Canadian life and helps them to make bracelets to send to their twinned school in Nepal. With Martel’s guidance, the relationship between the two schools is thus both educational and supportive.

Martel has also twice worked with the Association of Nepalese in Quebec to organize their annual supper to celebrate the Nepalese New Year. This event serves two purposes: it gives the Montreal community an opportunity to experience a Nepalese evening complete with traditional food, music and dance; and it is an occasion to raise funds to help the twinned school in the village of Dumbar, as well as four other schools in Sikkar Ambote and in the Kavre District.

Michèle Legault and Claude Martel are just two examples of how small acts of human kindness can travel great distances to both inspire and aid a worthy cause. Be sure to visit us frequently to learn more about how you can get involved too!