SLU student helps start Nepal school

CANTON — From halfway around the world, a St. Lawrence University student is helping his native country.

Senior Brijlal Chaudhari received a $10,000 grant through Projects for Peace, a nonprofit group that helps with grass-roots charity projects, to help start a high school in a village in Nepal, a small country just north of India.

"I'm kind of helping the infrastructure; I'm not changing the system. This is the first year," Mr. Chaudhari said. "Hopefully, the high school goes well and gets famous and lots and lots of people come from surrounding villages to study."

The grant money went to help the village buy a license to start a high school, which is not a standard feature in many towns and villages in Nepal. The nation's literacy rate is less than half of its population, according to the CIA.

In Nepal, the standard level of education ends at what is called Class 10, usually ages 16 to 18, according to Mr. Chaudhari. After that, students may go to high school, which lasts only two years.

Most high schools are in cities, and sending children away is expensive. A quarter of Nepal's population lives below the poverty line.

"Most of the people, if they finish the standard grade, they don't have the means to go to the city, especially for girls," said Mr. Chaudhari, who is spending this semester in Washington, D.C. "Once they graduate, the boys, they find jobs, and the girls, they get married, most of them within two years, and that's the end of their lives."

Mr. Chaudhari set out to try to change things two years ago, when he and a group of other SLU students formed Literacy for Nepal, which raised money to build a library in Mr. Chaudhari's hometown. The library was finished this summer.

"I started doing this because I wanted to build one library in my village," he said. "I thought I was going to fight everything with that. Building one library doesn't solve all the problems like ignorance and poverty. I applied for this grant to continue this."

The village school, before the high school started, had 2,400 students, and more than 80 percent of them passed the national exam at the end of Class 10, according to Mr. Chaudhari, an economics major. Both criteria prompted his interest in working with the village of Pankha-Mainpur.

Approximately 20 people from the village have applied to continue their education at the high school, which opened last month.

After he graduates this semester, Mr. Chaudhari said, he hopes to find a job in the U.S. capital for a year or two before returning home to try to expand the education system in Nepal.

"All the friends I know from home, they're in the United States studying," he said. "My long-term view of all of this is to establish a big university in Nepal. It's like an investment, but it's helping people."