Education has an impact on every person’s life. While having it was positive for me, not having it has been detrimental to ‘Chotu’ and other Nepalese inmates I met during my incarceration.
Chotu’s story has been playing in my mind, often. It is heart-wrenching and unjust, all because of his lack of education.
Innocently, Chotu still dreams of providing a decent life for his family. But without a proper education and desperate, he went to Qatar with a promise of construction work, but ended up in jail.
His alleged crime? Murder. Except, he has no idea why he has been charged with it and how long he will languish in jail.
Like many other uneducated Nepalese labourers, at the end of the workday, every day, Chotu and the other construction crew got together and hosed themselves down with an air-hose. The procedure removed dust, cement and anything else clinging to their clothes and bodies.
One afternoon one of them got sick. Chotu and a few others rushed their colleague to the hospital. Sadly, the sick man died two days later. Matters took a turn for the worse for Chotu and his friends: they were charged with his murder and sent to jail.
Sadly since his incarceration, he has only had periodic trips to the court in handcuffs. Unable to speak Arabic and without representation of any kind, he has not been informed of most of the details of his case, including how the man died, or how long this tragedy will last.
That brings me to a challenge to prevent similar cases from occurring.
Already more than 200 people have contributed to the fundraising campaign (startsomegood.com/edufreeNepal). Almost 27K have been pledged. Given the number of people that signed the petition on change.org, the number of times the campaign has been twitted, shared and liked on Facebook, we should be able to generate more participation!
Surely, we can get more than just a small fraction of the thousands of people already involved to contribute to the campaign and bring the contribution closer to the maximum goal. The closer the contribution is to the maximum goal, the more significant and long-lasting the impact to the education of the students at Raithane School.
To help with that, I will personally pledge Nepalese Rupees 50.00 (approximately US$0.50) per contributor until the duration of the campaign up to a limit of a 1000 contributors! Yes, I recognize that is an ambitious number but, if you haven’t realized, outrageous ambitions is what got me here!
I will be making this donation to the Nepal fundraising campaign, after the Startsomegood.com campaign is over.
Pledge away, please!
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Update
The fundraising drive ended at the end of June 2013.
