00:00 How does a 23-year-old American girl from New Jersey,
00:05 college-bound four years ago,
00:07 end up in a remote Himalayan village
00:10 raising over 200 children who have been orphaned
00:12 as a result of disease and civil war?
00:15 My story began exactly five years ago
00:19 when I woke up one morning at 18 years old
00:23 and had a scary realization.
00:26 I knew very little about myself
00:28 and what I wanted in my life.
00:30 So I packed up a backpack with very few belongings
00:35 and I decided to take a trip around the world.
00:37 I had never really traveled, never left my country.
00:40 All of a sudden, my whole world opened up.
00:42 There was so much to learn and so much to discover
00:46 outside of the walls of a four-walled classroom.
00:49 I was walking down the road one day
00:52 when I locked eyes with this little girl.
00:55 Her name is La Cora.
00:57 Her job every day was to take loads
01:00 from the bus park all the way into the villages
01:03 and she'd go back and forth, back and forth all day.
01:05 She'd make a dollar, two dollars in the day
01:07 to feed her family.
01:09 This is the life of a Nepalese orphan.
01:11 I looked at her and I saw every single piece of myself
01:15 and I was devastated.
01:19 I thought, what have we done as a human family
01:23 that our children are living this way?
01:25 (gentle music)
01:27 I soon kept reading and I found out
01:30 that there were 80 million children
01:32 just like her in the world and I was devastated.
01:36 And then I met one particular girl.
01:39 Her name was Hema and this is Hema here.
01:41 She was seven years old but every day
01:43 when I walked to meet her, she'd just smile
01:46 with these big, bright eyes and she'd say,
01:47 "Namaste, Didi," and I thought for the first time,
01:50 "Okay, Maggie, forget the 80 million.
01:52 "What if you just started with Hema?
01:54 "Is there something that you can do
01:55 "to change the life of just one child?"
01:57 And I thought at 18 and as the entrepreneurial mind
02:00 that I have, okay, I can do that.
02:03 What if I just supported the education of this one child?
02:05 How would her life change?
02:07 And this is Hema a couple weeks later.
02:10 I put her into school and followed and tracked her progress.
02:15 But the sad thing was that I didn't think it was enough.
02:20 There were kids that didn't have homes and families
02:22 and they were orphans and one day I had this idea.
02:27 I found a piece of land and it just happened
02:30 to be $5,000 and I wanted to build a home for orphan kids,
02:35 a home and then a school and a base.
02:37 I called up my parents and I said,
02:40 "Can you send me over my $5,000 of life savings?"
02:44 I had saved up from the time I was about six years old,
02:46 every penny I'd babysat starting from the time
02:48 I was 12 to when I was 18 and sure enough,
02:51 they wired over that $5,000 and I bought
02:54 my first piece of property in Nepal.
02:57 The world will change when our children
03:14 and our women are educated.
03:16 They have less children, they raise better families,
03:19 they raise more educated children, their disease,
03:21 everything decreases, poverty levels,
03:24 communities and villages change.
03:26 And the thing about this work that I do
03:27 is that it's very addicting.
03:28 So I thought, okay, one kid, if I could do one, why not 10?
03:32 What if my dream was to walk across this dry riverbed
03:35 one day and not see a single child breaking stone?
03:38 That's what I want.
03:39 I want to create a world that I want to see every day
03:42 and I think we have the power to do that.
03:44 I don't think you have to go 8,000 miles away
03:47 to the foothills of the Himalayas.
03:48 I think the beauty of all of us is that we have talents
03:52 and we have gifts and this just happened to be mine
03:56 and I'm really lucky to have found it
03:57 and created my little slice of heaven, my little paradise.
04:00 And I think that the world will change
04:02 when we all find that for ourselves,
04:04 where we wake up every day and we wouldn't rather
04:06 be anywhere else in the world doing any other kind of work.
04:11 We think of all the things we don't have
04:13 instead of the things that we do have.
04:15 Oh, I could do that if I had more money
04:17 once I have my PhD, after I'm settled,
04:19 after I'm established, after I'm famous.
04:22 Well, what if everything you had
04:23 was everything you have right now?
04:26 Your body and your mind and that sense of I can do anything.
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