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The Bupsa Project

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My name is Dirk Popen. I am seventeen years old and am currently in school at St. Patricks High School. I have lived in Sarnia my entire life and have never been outside North America, that is until I went to Nepal. On September 10th, 2016 I, along with seven others from Sarnia, went to Nepal to do a Climb For Kids under Big Brothers Big Sisters. While there, we conquered Everest Base Camp and made some great memories. What stuck with me the most didnt happen until after the climb. Three of us stayed to do some work with a local elementary school in Bupsa, aswell as one other person that flew in once we got off the mountain. The charity we met with at the school is called Moving Mountains and they take care of multiple projects all over Nepal and even across the world. What we didn't know though is, that they had no funds or supplies to repair and add on to the school. Unlike North America, they can't fundraise for their projects. The country is ridden with poverty so going door to door doesn't happen. They just hope and pray that someone like me comes along and wants to support them. Our sherpa, who actually sits on the board for Moving Mountains, told me alot about all the local projects. They get absolutly no funding from the government so Moving Mountains pays the teachers' salaries but that money is running out. The main thing is they are looking at repairing the elementary school and making an add on to it. The add on will be a building for highschool grades. Most of you probably know that elementary school is grades 1-8 and highschool is grades 9-12. Right now, all the highschool kids from Bupsa walk two to four hours every morning to get to school. Remember, this is Nepal and the villages are surrounded by mountains and crevasses which would make for a fairly strenuous walk. The add on alone is going to cost approximately $16,000 but they need more funds for teacher salaries as well. And the school is not the only project but one of many projects that Moving Mountains is working on. Another one is their monestary. Religion is top priority for them and it's also the most expensive of all the local projects. What they are looking to do is repair and rebuild two of three buildings. I don't know if anyone remembers but there was a large earthquake in Nepal with many aftershocks in 2015. You can probably imagine that some buildings would be destroyed entirely. One of the two buildings completely collapsed and the other is getting to that point. That's why it is going to cost $30,000 to rebuild and repair. The last project I am going to talk about is the one I know the least about and is the most important. They need a system to provide clean drinking water. While I was there, we were told to not drink any water unless it is bottled or you brought purification tablets. Sometimes they told us even the tablets wouldn't clean the water because there was something in it that couldn't be killed with just a tablet. I was not told an exact number but was told that it could range from $10,000-25,000 to acheive this. Now imagine if you lived somewhere that did not have constant clean water coming from your tap. What if you didn't have a vehicle to drive your children to school and they had to walk but you can't walk them there because you already started working two hours before they need to get to school. Could they even go to school if there was no teachers? How would they get an education? What if on the way to school they were cut badly and now have an infection but the health clinic doesn't have what your child needs because they ran out of it last month. All these things happen regularly in places all around the world. Do you think it should be that way? Probably not. Now you might notice that this doesn't add up to $100,000. Well, that's because I want them to be able to have a fund for teachers' salaries and to be able to keep there health clinic stocked. Depending how well this works I may even up the goal to $150,000. I am going to ask you to do something very small but very meaningful and that is to help me make a change. There is approximately 14 million people living in Ontario alone and if 100,000 donate only $1 then we would meet the goal. That is less than 1% of the Ontario population donating less than that of a coffee, or chocolate bar. Please help me make a change. Any size donation will help. $1 dollar donated is $1 closer to our goal. 

Thanks

Dirk Popen

Organizer

Dirk Popen
Organizer
Sarnia, ON

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