During 2004, I began looking at ways to assist inspiring work already being done to save lives and rebuild community in Nepal, one of the poorest, politically unstable and least developed countries in the world.

Nepal has one-third its population living below the poverty line and an unemployment rate of over forty-percent and literacy levels barely at twenty five-percent. For the past decade civil unrest and political instability has contributed to millions of people being displaced, becoming internal refugees and their lives disrupted.

Nepalese prospects for foreign trade and investment are poor, because of the small size of the economy, its technological backwardness, its remoteness, its landlocked geographic location, its guerrilla-based civil strife and its susceptibility to natural disaster. Nepal’s environment suffers from deforestation (overuse of wood for fuel and lack of alternatives); contaminated water (with human and animal wastes, agricultural runoff, and industrial effluents); loss of wildlife conservation and vehicular emissions.