What happened to Tara, however, was something wholly unexpected and extraordinary. It began when Tara fell in love with a man who barely spoke her own language.[break]
Utaka married Tara, and whisked her away to his hometown of Osaka, Japan. Saying her goodbyes to everyone she knew in Panchet, Tara knew she was leaving Kathmandu for good.
In Osaka, Tara started a completely new life and learned to read, write and count in her husband’s mother tongue. She lived there happily for years, and went on to have two beautiful daughters.
Yet Tara still felt unfulfilled and incomplete within.
What set Tara apart from others was her incredible drive. She studied hard because her childhood dream was to become a nurse, which was something of a distant reality for most girls from her village. Dreams and aspirations such as Tara’s rarely ever came to fruition, and Tara knew this. Against all odds, it seemed, however, Tara went on to graduate from a university in Japan and began working as a nurse in a local hospital.
Yet while Tara had accomplished a childhood dream, she knew something was missing. Though happily settled into family life and professionally sated, she never forgot her family or her friends back home in that small village in a rural part of northeastern Nepal.
Healthcare in Japan was something she had never seen before. It was brilliant, effective, and best of all, affordable. There was no reason why a basic model of this healthcare could not be introduced in Panchet where, on foot, villagers were days away from the nearest hospital and medical assistance. The healthcare system in Nepal had a long way to go, but Tara believed now that nothing was impossible.
With what little confidence she could muster and the small amount of savings she had, Tara set off back home to Nepal with the idea of building a health centre for her village. She could not have predicted the difficulties she would face trying to find hospitals and donors who would help her open up access to healthcare in rural Nepal.
“Why would you want to invest in a place so far from a major city?” she was constantly asked. “Invest your money wisely and spend it on hiring doctors here in Kathmandu.” Tara’s unerring faith in her dream was now starting to crumble.
She had one last chance. Tara had heard of a small hospital outside of Kathmandu in a town called Dhulikhel, which specialized in care in the community. With a heavy heart, she approached the director of Dhulikhel Hospital.
In the meeting, Tara spoke slowly in her broken and simple Nepali, about her fears, about how little money she had to establish a health centre, and about how much she wanted to change her village.
There was a loaded silence, before the director finally spoke. “Tara, you’ve come to us with a brilliant idea and sincere motives. Why dwell on how little money you have?”
It was this very sentence that ensured that, stone by hand-carved stone, the Solambu Health Centre stands where it is today. Poignantly, just before the health centre opened, a young, pregnant woman from Tara’s village died due to complications – complications, which, perhaps, would not have killed her had she been able to reach medical help immediately.Currently, the health centre serves a population of around 35,000 villagers from in and around Solambu. By the end of next year, certainly, some 75,000 people will have round-the-clock access to healthcare once a bridge connecting Panchet to Solambu is completed.
And as Tara truly is a bright shining “star,” upon her return to Osaka, she established the INGO called Nepali Tara, which continues to fund the health centre, and also funded the building of a new school in Panchet.
Together with several other Japanese organizations and well-wishers, both the health centre and the school are helping to turn Tara’s dream of uplifting her community into a reality.
Two years on, the Solambu Health Centre stands proudly overlooking Tara’s village, almost as if it was keeping an eye on Panchet in her absence.
Around the periphery of the centre, small orange and apple trees are being planted on a regular basis to provide stock for the storage rooms of the community centre currently being constructed next to it.
The smallest of the orange trees grows timidly to the right hand side of the footpath leading to the canteen. This very tree will one day bear fruits for any one of the 75,000 people living locally, and eventually grow to see other orange trees flourish in the same manner.
It is all thanks to one girl who dared to dream – big!
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