Giving Kids a Chance: Sausalito's Olga Murray supervises the Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation
-- Marin Independent Journal * Sunday, December 2, 2001

By Beth Ashley
IJ senior feature writer

Our car speeds through the trash-filled streets of Katmandu, crosses the Bagmati River to Patan, and weaves its way through a rural neighborhood to a gleaming white house overlooking a valley. The lawn is green, the flowerbeds filled with marigolds.

Eight young girls mob the car. "Olga Mommy," they call. "Olga-Didi!"

Olga Murray of Sausalito is engulfed in their embrace.

Murray, 76, is the founder and guiding spirit of the Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation, a non-profit agency that rescues Nepali children from lives of misery and want and provides them with safety, education and love.

K House, a residence for 24 young girls, is one of several programs run by the foundation, largely supported by Bay Area donors. Six months of the year, from her bayside home in Sausalito, Murray is chief fund-raiser - this year, the budget is $660,000.

But now she is back in Katmandu, supervising the future of NYF, which she and an American volunteer began in 1990, after Murray broke her leg in a trekking accident and got a look at the underside of Nepali life in a Katmandu hospital.

The girls at K House take their visitors on a tour of the facility. "Come, come," says Rajani, 8, tugging my hand and skipping up the polished stone stairways. Each bedroom contains two or three or four sets of bunk beds, all with matching bedspreads and cupboards for the children to keep their clothes (although, Murray says, most of the clothes end up on different children every day).

On the ground floor is a large dining room, and a kitchen where girls chop vegetables for the noontime meal. In the yard, girls play a free-form game of badminton, or give each other rides on the house bicycle.

Wherever Murray goes, she has a child grasping her hand or sitting in her lap or trying to kiss her cheek. Murray proudly introduces the children, among them teen-agers Tika and Shanta, who have been accepted to nursing school. Shanta came to K House after NYF found her living outdoors, sleeping under a tarp near the brick factory where she was a child worker.

The joyful spirit at K House carries over to J House, a few blocks away, where 27 boys live together, play basketball on the brand new court, study with tutors and prepare themselves for better lives.

"Education is everything," says Murray, "and these children know it."

Many of the J House and K House children are physically handicapped; some have been rescued from lives of begging; all had been so traumatized by the circumstances of life that a loving environment is their only hope for a future. Among newcomers to J House: Anil, who was abandoned by his drug-addict parents on the streets of Katmandu at the age of four months; brothers Prasad and Shyam, whose mother abandoned them as toddlers and whose father is in jail for murder.

The group homes are not all that NYF supports. Murray reels off statistics about other programs, emphasizing how much can be done with a relative pittance of money: $50 can buy a year's education, $200 can restore a severely malnourished child to good health. She says NYF now supports the education of 800 children in Nepal, from kindergarten through medical school.

She is perhaps proudest of NYF's Nutrition Rehabilitation Home, where pitifully sick and malnourished kids get a healthy new start.

Beds at the home are built extra wide, so mothers can sleep with their children. The children are fed, and their mothers get daily lessons in how to make cheap but nourishing meals.

"This is a place where those of us who thrive on instant gratification can get our fill of daily miracles," says Murray. "The children come in looking like they're from Somalia; a few months later they leave with fat cheeks."

The home helped 150 children last year.

Other programs:

• Scholarships for 250 children in rural villages who would otherwise not go to school. Uniforms, supplies and school fees only cost about $50, but when the average yearly income of a Nepali family is $200, that cost is prohibitive. NYF makes the difference.
  
  NYF also pledges to pay for college if students can qualify. Last year, 11 village students passed their exams and are now attending college.
  
  
• A teacher hiring and training program in villages: Rural schools are often crucially understaffed. NYF now pays three-quarters of the salary for 73 additional teachers. NYF also conducts teacher training programs in the villages, the most recent one for 100 teachers.
  
  
• An indentured daughters program to rescue young girls who have been sold into servitude by families who cannot afford to support them; the girls' earnings are sent home to support the children who remain.

NYF now pays 154 families - not in cash, but in the form of a piglet which will be a reliable source of money, and with a kerosene lamp plus fuel, to upgrade the family's life. NYF also provides a school uniform, book bag and school fees for each of the rescued girls. NYF plans to double the number of girls in this program next year.

The list goes on: Murray says she and the staff can respond quickly to crisis situations because they are independent and free of rules;it can get help quickly to those who need it. (There are no signs on J House or K House, for instance: "We don't think of ourselves as institutions," says Murray.)

Some of her "programs" aren't programs at all.

Each year, Murray joins the children on a three-day "social work" camping trip to the countryside, where they wrrite and present plays on such subjects as the evils of child marriage, alc oholism and domestic abuse, the need to educate girls. The next day they demonstrate how to use a toothbrush.

Once a year Murray takes 10 girls from K House to her own home for a slumber party; the girls get bubble baths, share soft giant beds, and eat a special breakfast.

On the Saturday after our visit, she will host a group of the younger children at her home, to teach them to use the dictionary. "Often, the children can read, but they don't know the meaning of the words," says Murray. "They don't undersand words like 'nasty' and 'spooky.'"

Jason Chen of Cotati, who became Executive Director of NYF in August, returned last week from a visit to Murray and Katmandu. After years of working on education al projects in China, he joined NYF for its "strong sense of compassion and professionalism." He says Murray's work not only helps young children, but their familie "for generations to come." One can tell her commitment, he says, "just looking at her face."

Life is obviously full and deeply satisfying to Murray, a retired attorney who worked for 37 years with the California Supreme Court in San Francisco but always hoped to end up working with children.

She is the picture of contentment on a couch at K House, surrounded by snuggling children.

She knows the story of each, and cares earnestly about each girl's future.

"There's nothing more wonderful," she says, "than taking children who are desperately poor and providing them with education, health care and love."

Contributions to the Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation can be sent c/o Murray, 3030 Bridgeway, Suite 211, Sausalito, CA 94965. For information, see the NYF web site, www.NepalYouthFoundation.org.