Well, I've been meaning to write about this, but haven't. So typical of me... :)

Before I left Nepal, Arjun came and sat in my room on the spare bed where Bibek occasionally sleeps. He didn't look at me, just pretended like he was doing something. This is how Arjun approaches conversations with me; he lingers.

"What is it Arjun?"

"Ah... nothing..."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah."

And then what he does is suddenly and abruptly looks up at me as though the idea just struck him, as if it wasn't at all the only reason he came into my room, and says:

"Emma Didi!!"

"Yup?"

"So... you are going to America?"

"Yup."

"Can you buy me one game system? I am sure it must be cheaper there."

"Uhm..."

"Yeah, yeah, can you?...."

Last time I went home, I also brought Arjun back something he had asked for; a stuffed animal. Now the funny thing about it was that my dear 14 year old had actually asked me for it a few years prior; I just forgot. Then when I was home, I saw one and suddenly remembered. I knew he was probably too old for it, but for some reason I still thought it would be funny if I embarrassed him and brought it to him. I'm not going to lie, it was hilarious.

And then, suddenly with a half smile through gritted teeth he says, "And don't make it like that time I asked you for a doll and you brought it years later."

I started cracking up, "That was funny, wasn't it, Jun?"

Still through the gritted teeth, "No, didi! It wasn't funny at all! You caused me so much tension! I was like, 13 - what do I need with a stuffed doll at 13?"

Okay, this story just isn't as funny when I can't do the impersonations of Arjun... but trust me, it was a riot.

Yay! I get to see my beloved family in just 6 days. I cannot even wait. I love them so much more than I think anyone who reads this will ever imagine.

my friend and i are having a fundraiser this weekend in colorado... here's our write up about it... and if you happen to have friends here... send them!!

Imagine a five-year-old child using drugs. He doesn’t know how to write the alphabet, but he knows how to roll a joint or how to prepare a dose of hallucinatory drugs because he’s been doing it for so long he doesn’t even remember when it was that he took his first hit. It’s a startling image; one you might pass off as impossible or improbable, but it’s the reality for a large percentage of the 100 million + street kids worldwide.

That’s how old Bibek was when we first met him; how old he was when he was already a regular user. And as the young boy publically self-destructed on the streets of Nepal, a thousand people walked by, or worse yet, blamed him for his status as a street child.... and hundreds and hundreds of miles away, on the streets of Cape Town, South Africa, the same thing happened to six year old Randy*. The two boys from very different political and cultural landscapes are bound by a common childhood: one devoid of love, protection and self worth, but instead filled with violence, exploitation, and the constant harshness of their daily reality as they struggle to survive.

Disregarded, dismissed and considered the refuse of society, street kids throughout the world are subjected to exploitation by drug dealers, pedophiles and society at large. It’s estimated that more than 90% of street children have suffered abuse. In most of these countries, the faulty legal systems in tact continue to fail the children at risk, reaffirming their innate belief that they are worth nothing, not even protection.

The Hines Foundation and the Brown Foundation are partner organizations that work together to change the lives of street children on global scale, one child at a time. Through a decade of experience working in the field, we’ve learned that true rehabilitation only occurs through the presence of consistent, reliable, love that a recovering street child can grow to trust.

Currently we focus all of our efforts on issues of street life and drug rehabilitation in South Africa and Nepal, but hope someday soon to expand into other countries as well.

We would like to invite you for a Sunday afternoon at Namaste Restaurant in Lakewood to learn and share about the lives of street kids through our video screening, short talk and Silent Auction. We are kindly asking a $5 optional cover charge that will go directly to impact the lives of street children in South Africa & Nepal.

All donations or purchases in the silent auction are tax deductible.

Thank you so much for taking the time to hear our stories, support our efforts and be part of the solution!!!!

See you Sunday!!!!!!!!!!!!!

and someone wrote about my boy bibek:

This really hit home. I met Bibek in Pokhara about a month and a half ago. I was catching a microbus back to Kathmandu and Bibek was at the microbus station (my friend recognised him). He approached us timidly; a desire for love and fear mixed in equal measure. After assuring my friend that he was fine, he fled and disappeared into the early morning crowd in Prithvi Chowk. I have wondered since then what happened to Bibek.

although there is a weird caveman (i.e. santosh dai) present in this pic... this is still and most likely always will be my favourite picture of me and my boy, beebs....

i love my boy... an notice, he's the toothless one in the header... ah, he's all grown up.

How to Help.

From time to time, people ask me "how" I support these kids... I've been thinking about this answer recently and decided one word describes how, over the last 4 years, I've supported these kids: faith.

Many, if not most, months I really don't know how or where the money will come from. In the early years, I really understood the hardships of being a single mother trying to make ends meet. Those days led me to get this tattoo and to really surrender all my life plans. We can only work so hard for some things, and they either come through or they don't.

Well, we've finally set up a stateside 501 (k) for donors to get their tax write offs! The foundation acts as an umbrella foundation for a few projects in Nepal and hopefully, as we see fit, elsewhere in the world. The best thing is, there is no overhead costs when making a donation to our organization. We have no paid staff in the states and don't spend a single dime on glossy letterhead and the likes... Basically, every single penny you send goes directly to serving the communities we work with in Nepal.

The projects I've helped set up that will be under the foundation are these kids you've probably been reading about on this blog for some time, as well as the female rehabilitation centre my friends and I set up in Pokhara, Nepal.

If you would like to contribute to either of these projects, you can mail a check to:

W.E. Hines Foundation
2500 Dallas Pkwy, Suite 260
Dallas, TX 75093

In the memo of the check just write "Nepal: street kids" or "Nepal: rehab centre".

Hopefully soon we will have a paypal option and a website... but as for now, that's how we do it!

Thank you so much for playing an active role in the work we do in Nepal. You are vital to our kids' and female drug users' success.

unfiltered ramblings. like always.

i'm very far away from my kids. they have their phone switched off, because well, they are weird like that. luckily we live in the kind of town where i can call the shopkeeper and say, "yo, have you seen my kids? are they alive?" and he says, "yeah, they're alive. dorje came to get milk just an hour ago."

so they are breathing. that's a good sign.

but how are they living? ah... that question remains unanswered.

i called x and woke him up early in the morning yesterday and the daft bollywood ring tone that makes me laugh in nepal, warmed my asian heart that's still suffering from reverse culture shock from overexposure to the "american life". so x actually answered the phone. he never answers the phone when i call. hm, maybe he answered because it was an international number, maybe i should take offense that he doesn't answer my phone calls in nepal, but somehow i don't. x is the one guy who can blow me off a million times and i still won't ever get mad. maybe because he's rescuing children from sexual exploitation on the regular, maybe because he's more committed to justice and street kids than any person i've ever met, maybe just because he has a british accent. i don't know which, but i still let him ignore my phone calls for weeks at a time without even flinching.

more possibly, maybe because he keeps tabs on my kids like no other when i'm away.

bibek's on the streets. it's not surprise, really. a week after i left nepal, bibek landed up on the doorstep of my kathmandu apartment. kathmandu is a six hour bus ride away from pokhara. , so without a rupee to his name, my boy, who i still count as one of the street smartest people i've ever met, made his way on a six hour journey and finagled his way through the streets of kathmandu until he landed at my other flat. he thought maybe i was "joking" (a word bibek thinks to be synonymous with lying...which, i guess it sort of is) about going out of nepal. he thought i was just kicking it in the capital, so he came to find me. my friends took him by the hand, took him to kalanki, and put him on the next bus back to pokhara.

i'm the most stable thing in bibek's little life, and anyone who knows me, knows that i am anything but stable.

x said he saw beebs roaming around on the streets and when he asked him what he was doing he said with his normal bibek confidence, "oh, i just decided to move back to the streets." as if 'moving' back to the streets was something legitimate, a real choice, a viable option. it's something he can do, because, well, why not?

how can i balance my life? how can i take care of my bibek and support him financially? i can't make money in nepal, but when i leave the country to get an income to support his life, he can't stay away from the life he used to live.

i know bibek knows that i love him. i know that. but i also know that he doesn't quite know how to love himself or let anyone else truly take care of him or help him make the right decisions. i blame myself for not being a constant in his life, even though i know the rationale that logistically, it's impossible. sometimes i want to demand the nepali government give me actual custody of the boy (which goes against current laws), but even then... will gallivanting around between nepal and bombay and america be a more stable life? at least he won't do drugs. at least he won't run the risk of sexual exploitation. at least he won't grow up thinking the world's against him and that all men are evil. at least he'll know love.

it's incredible how an eleven year old boy can break my heart more than anyone else in the world... pray for my beebs.

plans of love.

Sometimes I joke that my kids are the best kind of kids to have because unlike other parents I can always abandon them for weeks on end and be free to pursue other things. I say it jokingly, but in some sense, I really do believe that. I'm just being honest! I love my kids but I would go out of my mind and probably fall into a deep state of depression if they were where my life began and ended. I'm a restless soul and my heart longs for more.

What happens to the kids when I'm away? That's what many people would like to know. I used to have a guy who came and stay with them. In fact, I have had a number of babysitters, nannies, social workers or whatever you want to call them but it's hard to come by a soul who can handle my kids.

My kids don't trust people. If they sense you don't truly and genuinely love them and have their best interest at heart, they aren't going to listen. “That guy doesn't love us,” they'll say to me, “He's just coming here so he can take your salary. He would never make this much money in another job.”

They've been b.s. detectors since they were very young because the only way a kid survives on the streets is by knowing who's full of it and who's not. Usually an optimist when it comes to judging characters, my kids are quite different than me – they are nice to everyone, but they know there are a lot of people in the world with ulterior motives.

The other day Bibek got hit by a motor bike and a friend of mine was going to take us to the hospital. Bibek didn't want to have anything to do with it. “Do you think that guy – or any guy for that matter – would help me if they saw me in the street with this leg? No. The only reason he's helping you now is because you are a westerner and he wants something else from you.” Bibek's known for some time that there are two main things that fall under the category of “something else” - American visas and sex. For sure my friend isn't like that, but always a skeptic, Bibek wouldn't budge.

So back to who they stay with. These days they are staying under the careful watch of the only boy they know it's safe to trust: my oldest. Soraj is the most serious of them all. The only time he's ever done anything bad is when he found out the father who doesn't even play a role in his life had tuberculosis. Soraj sold our television to pay medical expenses for his father and then ran away because of the guilt. He wound up sleeping at the pad of a fairly notorious drug dealer. In my search to find Soraj I ran into the dealer and out of cordiality asked him what he was up to, "Oh, you know... the same... selling drugs. Mostly heroin... sometimes ganja or pills but mostly things for injecting...You already know, Emma... so that's why I'm not even going to bother to lie." Kudos for bluntness.

Sewa and I met a dishevelled version of Soraj a few days later and over a plate of fried momos, Soraj trembled and poured out confessions of every minute sin he'd ever committed in his short life. He loved his father but I think it hurt him even more that he hurt us because we were and still are his familyl.

One time I asked Soraj about girls. He just gave me a look and said, “Didi, I don't want to think about this. I am not looking at girls, not thinking about girls. I don't want to be distracted. I will just try to focus and work hard and then one day, God will tell me which girl to marry and I will marry her and that will be all.” Basically, God's arranging his marriage so there's no point in the frivolities of teenage romance.

Last month, with a climactic last week, I had escapades with Bibek on par with days of old. It's been a while since I've had to literally had to fight against the stubborn wills of self destructing street kids in order to save them from their worst enemies - themselves - but with Bibek this summer has been along those lines. I just didn't know if I could do the whole chasing after him, reassuring him of my love and his security amongst us thing any longer. I didn't know if I could endure his psychotic fits of rage. Actually, I take that back – I couldn't endure those things and I told God one fine night, "I can't do it – you are going to have to take care of this child for me right now because it's just not in me.”

Bibek was on the streets for a week. I couldn't even bring myself to visit him. I just couldn't. I figured what was a few more days of street living in the life of a child so very comfortable with it. Bibek quickly picked up the drug habit as if he'd never left it and he blended in with the other street kids as if it were the only version of life he'd ever known. My kids met him in the road one day and asked him what he was going to do. “I'm going to take a year off school and be a khatay,” he used a very derogatory term for street kid to identify who and what he wanted to become, “then I will rejoin school next year,” as if going on sabbatical from his studies in order to pursue his calling to the streets was a viable choice for an eleven year old.

"Didi, that boy...." the others shook their heads at me, "We just can't help him if he is so stubborn."

Like me, the majority of my other boys have grown tired of the whole street fiasco scene.

On my last day in Pokhara before some extended time out of Nepal, I wondered what would happen to Bibek while I was gone. I'm the only person who fights for his life and if now even I don't do that, who will? Surely not him. The thought made me nauseous.
The sun was already down and I still didn't know what I would do, what he would do. I came back home, trying to push the thought far from my mind, arguing that it won't do any good to be full of anxiety and worry about the matter, only to find a clean, un-street Bibek sitting on our porch waiting for me. It wasn't the Bibek of Kathmandu who shouted profanities through windows and sunk his teeth into my arm. This was the Bibek of our calm, relatively undisrupted life. The only time he spoke was when he said, “Soraj dai told me to come. He said he will walk me to school every morning and wait for me outside of my school every evening to make sure I go. Is it okay?”

Soraj was the angel who brought me back my boy when I couldn't do it myself.

At around ten at night I thought I would go to bed to be ready for an early morning but Soraj stopped me. “No, Didi! You can't go to sleep now. You have to sit with us. You aren't going to see us for a long time and we aren't going to see you too. Why do you need sleep? You sit with us and just look at our faces. You have to look at Bibek.”

I did it and I remembered why I miss them so much when I'm not with them. Sometimes people confuse my weird family as some sort of act of sacrifice, as if I gave up so much to be with them. The truth is, the real sacrifice happens when I'm away from them. It's when I miss watching them grow up and miss being with them that I give up something truly valuable.

Before I went to bed Soraj said one more thing to me that made me sure I was leaving my kids in the right hands, even if he is only seventeen. “Didi, I'm going to take care of everything now – just you wait and see. And then, when you come back, I'm going to tell you my life plan.”

“Your life plan? Just tell me now.”

“No didi,” he smiled, “it's too big and you have too many things on your mind. But I will tell you when you come again. I promise you didi, it's really big.”

My boy may be a pragmatic realist, but I guess he's a dreamer and a visionary too.

"It has to do with helping people, doesn't it?"

"How do you know????” he said with a surprise as if I had read his mind.

"I know you guys, don't I?”

His smile was one of ease, “Yeah Didi, you know us guys... You know all the things about us guys...”


I miss them already....