Transform a village in Nepal

Bishnu doesn’t allow himself to dream too big. He’s a 36-year-old granddad with four daughters and a grandson relying on him. “If I were to have many dreams, I think they’ll remain just dreams,” he says. He is talking to the local film crew BMS World Mission has commissioned to gather stories for our 2022 Harvest appeal, Good Land.

Parbati, Bishnu’s wife, also struggles at first when she’s asked about her dreams for her community. “I don’t know,” she says. “I want it to be good… right? I wish my family would have happiness and peace.”

Bishnu and Parbati live in Ghusel village. Spread across three hills in the mountains of Nepal, Ghusel is breathtakingly beautiful. It can also be incredibly hard to reach. “As a whole, it’s a very isolated community,” says Amos, who works for BMS partner the Multipurpose Community Development Service (MCDS) in Nepal. “They have a scarcity of water, they don’t have proper sanitation facilities, the health posts are very far away. So they are marginalised in different ways.”

There are more than 400 families living in Ghusel village, each with their own dreams, struggles and stories. Through our Good Land appeal, you and your church can partner with the people of Ghusel to help them transform their village. They want to equip their whole community to access better education, improve their livelihoods, and have good health – and with your support, they can do it.

Not far away from Bishnu’s house you will find Shiva, Bishnu’s father, working away grinding flour on his water mill. The mill floods regularly, so it can only really be used for four months of the year, causing big problems both for Shiva and for the many other families who use it.

Shiva works hard, as do his children, but he wishes they had been able to finish school. Bishnu and his brothers and sisters dropped out when they were barely teenagers. Shiva wants things to be different for his granddaughters. “I believe it will be good for my grandchildren if they study well,” he says. “If they are able to study well, their future will be better.”

It’s hard to watch his son struggling to feed his family, and Shiva knows that a good education will help his grandchildren have more opportunities. When your survival depends on growing crops and rearing animals, life can become precarious in an instant. Just last year, ten of Bishnu’s goats got sick with diarrhoea and died. It was devastating for the family. Everything they’d invested in caring for the animals was gone.

“After the goats died, I thought I shouldn’t have done this business,” says Bishnu. “The goats were about to die, so I had to spend the money that was supposed to be for my children’s education on treating the goats. We had to keep and take care of them for a long time, and they just died. So, I had to bear a lot of loss.”

Like Bishnu, the majority of families in Ghusel village rely on agriculture for their survival. When their animals get sick, the future of their whole families can hang in the balance. Suddenly, they have to make the agonising choice between paying vet fees to try and save their animals, or sending their children to school – and sometimes it’s too late, and they lose everything.

We ask Bishnu about his dreams again. This time, he has a very concrete answer. “I really want to take veterinary training,” he says, “so that all my goats and buffalo will be healthy.”

It’s not just the animals in Ghusel village that get sick. Unclean water and poor sanitation mean that people in the community regularly get ill, too. “There’s always someone getting sick,” says Anita, a teacher in Ghusel. “The water source is in an open area… and they say there is open defecation there. There are houses near the water source, they wash clothes there and animals roam freely. So the water source is deteriorating and it’s becoming polluted.”

There’s no hospital nearby, so when people get really unwell they have to travel long distances for the medical help they desperately need. And in the monsoon season, that can mean being carried for hours on an improvised stretcher made from sacks and bamboo, risking landslides on dangerous mountain roads.

That’s what happened to Anita when she was in labour with her son. After 24 hours, her family realised they needed to get her to a hospital. “Landslides were happening and they had to carry me through a risky road,” says Anita. “I didn’t know if I’d reach the hospital or not. In two or three places they put me down and waited for the landslides to be over. I was very scared.”

It took four hours to carry Anita on a stretcher to the nearest ambulance. And then it was another hour’s drive to the hospital. There was no guarantee that either she or her baby son would survive the journey.

Anita never wants to have to go through this again. “An intense desire from all the women from this community is that there will be a safe birthing place here,” she says. Although Parbati couldn’t think of a dream at first, like all of us, she has many secret hopes. Towards the end of her conversation with the film crew, she shares one. It’s for her children. “I want my children to have a good future… to be educated, to be able to eat good food, be able to live in a good land and to be happy.”

It’s what every loving parent wants for their children. And it’s one you can help secure – for Parbati and Bishnu’s family, and for every family in Ghusel village. We’ve done it before in other remote communities in Nepal and, together, we can do it again.

“The people of Ghusel are amazing. They’re created and loved by God, and they have dreams to make life better for their whole village,” says development worker Amos. “Together, we can empower the people of Ghusel village to achieve their dreams. Will you help us?”