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"When Maggie Doyne was a high school senior, she was on track. You know the one: Graduate on time and with good grades, spend four years at college, get a job\u2014probably in an office and perhaps a short train ride away from her suburban hometown. And then she woke up.\n\n\"I just literally woke up one morning feeling empty, not knowing what my purpose was,\" the New Jersey native explains. \"The thought of going to college was intimidating to me because I didn't know what I wanted to do, or who I wanted to be, or what I wanted to put my energy towards. So at the very last moment, I put off college. It was a big surprise to everybody.\" She signed herself up for a gap year program that combined outdoor survival classes with service learning, and headed off to southern Asia, backpack in tow.\n\nHer second semester found her in India at a time when civil war was raging across the border in Nepal. The conflict created nearly a million orphans in the country, and many refugee children were fleeing to northeastern India, where Maggie was stationed. After months of working with the refugee community, she decided she wanted to see what was going on in Nepal for herself.\n\nTraveling with a displaced Nepali teenager she befriended in India, she made her way to \"the middle of nowhere\" following a ceasefire. \"We spent two and a half days on a bus, and then three days walking, trekking, climbing mountains,\" she says. \"It was really strenuous, and also just so beautiful. I felt so at home, but I was really shocked to see the way women and children were living. I had never seen anything like that.\"\n\nShe continued to travel throughout the region, meeting kids and listening to their stories, trying to process the extreme poverty and dangerous conditions that were a reality of post-civil war life. She started to pick up the language, and made a decision\u2014a really huge, life-altering decision\u2014to put down roots in the Kopila Valley, convincing her parents to wire her the $5,000 she saved up from years of babysitting. The money went toward buying land on which she built a children's home; there are now 42 kids who call her \"mom.\"\n\n\"I wanted to give these kids a childhood similar to the one that I had, with family and love,\" she explains. A couple years later, she opened a school for students in the region: \"Kids were laboring and being sold as domestic servants. They were getting in really bad situations, begging on the streets, breaking rocks on the side of the road. I didn't want to see it anymore. I wanted them to have a safe, happy place where they could thrive and learn.\" The school\u2014one of Nepal's top-performing institutions\u2014currently has 340 students. There's a nutrition program, a clinic, and after-school activities; a high school is in the process of being built.\n\nThe next phase of Maggie's work? A women's center. \"A lot of the women in my community were really struggling, and I was constantly having to call the police to report domestic violence. Suicide has actually emerged as the leading killer of women in Nepal,\" Maggie says. \"Not a single woman in our immediate community could even write her own name, so the thought was to go back in time and give them the skills they needed to be better mothers and caregivers.\" Just as the school is a safe space for Nepali children, the center has become a source of light for the women in the community.\n\nOne of the center's more surprising focuses, at least to the outside world, is menstruation. \"In Nepal, there are a lot of taboos around periods,\" Maggie explains. \"Girls and women have to leave the house and aren't allowed to sleep in their homes. It makes them a target for sexual abuse, trafficking, and other violence. Girls who are menstruating are 75% less likely to attend school, so we created our own design for a sanitary napkin for them to wear because they don't otherwise have access to pads or tampons. We started making sanitary kits at the women's center so they could understand it's not a dirty thing or a curse. Women don't even really have underwear in this part of the world, so we're designing underwear, too.\"\n\nIt's a shocking reality, but Maggie articulates\u00A0that\u00A0it's a domino effect that starts at a young age. Not having the knowledge or the physical tools to manage their periods means girls miss school and perhaps even sleep in a cowshed with animals, factors that can have a severe impact on their mental health, not to mention their education. \"The girls and women have improved so much through the school and the center,\" she says. \"It's been inspiring to see all these generations join forces in a place where they're safe and supported. It's about empowerment and lifting each other and themselves up. They think their problems are really bad, but when they come together and realize everyone has the same worries and concerns and needs, it just gets so much better.\"\n\nAs Maggie's work has snowballed, so has the support around it. There's now a fellows program that attracts volunteers from around the world, and the\u00A0impact\u00A0in Kopila is truly just the beginning. \"If you told me when I was 16 that I was going to be living in remote Nepal and be a mom to 42 kids, I would have looked at you like you were the biggest liar in the world,\" she says. \"I didn't have any idea where life could take me, or that it could be this good and fulfilling. I wake up every day loving my work and thinking I have the greatest job in the universe. It's like, how did this happen?\"\n\nLearn more about (and even make a donation to!) what Maggie's doing in Nepal\u00A0at the website for her\u00A0BlinkNow Foundation."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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