American philanthropist Maggie Doyne has supported the education of 200 orphaned children, and also set up a women’s centre and school in Nepal, among other ventures. Recollecting her journey in a video compilation by Goalcast video, she said that her journey began at the age of 18 when she realised that she knew “very little” about herself.
“So, I packed up a backpack with very few belongings, and decided to take a trip around the world. I had never really travelled, or left my country. All of a sudden, my whole world opened up,” said New Jersey-born Doyne.
“There is so much to learn, and so much to discover outside of a four-walled classroom,” she noted, recalling an incident of meeting a Nepalese orphan who made $2 to feed her family. “I saw every single piece of her in myself and was devastated. I thought what we have done as humans that our children are living this way. I kept reading and found that there are 80 million children like her. But I happened to meet a girl called Hema who would greet me by saying, ‘Namaste Didi, and I told myself, what if you started with just one girl? What can you do to change the life of just one child?,” she mentioned.
She eventually decided to build up a home for orphaned children in Nepal with her savings from babysitting, as well as donations from local and global sources.
“The world will change when our children and women are educated. They will have less children. They raise better families, educated children. Diseases decrease, poverty levels come down. Communities change. I want to create a world that we would want to see everyday. And we have the power to do that,” she described.
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