Happiness That Is Contagious
Dear friends, dear project sponsors of Back to Life,
warm greetings on the second Sunday of Advent from Nepal. Today I would like to dedicate the lights of Advent to Khushi, whose path would have taken a very different course without your compassion. Many of you keep asking about the promising young woman we have been accompanying for 15 years now.
A Life That Was Almost Lost
Khushi’s story begins in a remote mountain village in Mugu, in western Nepal. As a small child, she fell against a pot of boiling oil while playing. The burns were devastating: from the chin down, her shoulders, her entire upper body to the waist, and one arm were extensively burned. It is nothing short of a miracle that she survived, for there is no medical care in the mountains. Her mother nursed her alone for weeks, without painkillers or dressings and with no prospect of real healing.
Then her father died. With four children to care for, the mother faced deep worries about survival.
When we first met Khushi in 2010, she was five years old – marked by severe scars. She could barely lift her arm, could move her mouth only with difficulty, and could hardly speak. She did not go to school and was excluded by others. Her mother said the sentence that changed everything: “Please take my child with you. There is no future for her here.”
The Step Into a New Life
From then on, we took Khushi by the hand. For adequate medical care, we brought her with us to Kathmandu, to a specialized hospital. Since then, Back to Life has covered every recurring medical procedure she needs, and we finance Khushi’s education as well as her living costs.
The first operations gave her back her mobility, released the worst scar contractures, and restored her speech. Khushi endured it all bravely; she knew she was being helped – despite the immense pain. Over the years, further operations with skin grafts and intensive physiotherapy followed. The girl found stability in a foster family that lovingly took her in, and a school where, for the first time, she recognized her own abilities. Friendships, new horizons, and the feeling of being accepted gradually transformed the shy girl into a curious, open child who no longer merely survived but began to flourish.
In no time she learned English at school, which she speaks today as fluently as if it were her mother tongue. The little girl from the mountains quickly established herself as the top of her class – a position she would hold all the way to her school-leaving exams in 2023.
It touched me deeply when Khushi said about her life: “I am truly very lucky. I have three mothers: one who gave birth to me, one who is raising me, and one who gave me a new life.”
Between Two Worlds
When she spends this autumn in her home village in Mugu, she takes part in our project “Chhaupadi-Free Villages.” She speaks openly with the villagers about Chhaupadi, the age-old tradition of isolating women in cattle sheds during menstruation. Vividly, she describes her own inner conflict when she comes from Kathmandu to the mountains and is expected to endure her period in the cowshed. She points out that women in the rest of Nepal spend their menstruation hygienically in the safety of their homes and are therefore not punished by spirits. She gets people thinking. Her own family in Mugu has since turned away from this old practice – a step that Khushi proudly calls “the change that begins at home.”
During her stay in Mugu, Khushi fulfills a long-held dream: a trek to Murma Top, 3,600 meters high. When she finally looks out from the summit over the surrounding mountains of her homeland after a long ascent, she says:
“Here I realize what kind of difference I want to make one day.”
Your Help Makes People Shine
Khushi makes visible what kind of future can grow when a person is not given up on and support arrives exactly where it is needed. So, to close, I would like to give you her own words: “Everything I am today and will yet become, I owe to people who believed in me before I could do so myself. With the help of Back to Life, I will always carry this light forward.”
Please help with this, dear friends of Back to Life.
I wish you and your loved ones a special second Sunday of Advent,
Yours, Tara Stella Deetjen
