January 30, 2014 marked the first ‘Last Thursday’ session of the year with Ms. Pushpa Basnet, also fondly known as ‘Mamu’, a social worker and Founder/President of Early Childhood Development Center and Butterfly Home. She shared her stories and strategies on furthering her work with the roughly 145 people who had attended the session at Direction Exhibition and Convention Center (DECC).
She described how it all started with her gap year when she had failed her SLC exams – she volunteered at Bal Mandir in Naxal. There she saw kids that had absolutely nothing to call their own and thus being forced to live off whatever little Bal Mandir could give them. She would sometimes compare those kids with herself – how she had everything that she could want in life, while at the same time there were kids having to under such misery. The compassion that she felt for those kids was what was going to change her for good. She was to become a different kind of human being altogether.
Currently, Ms. Basnet has been helping 41 children from 22 jails in and out of Kathmandu. She hopes that somewhere down the line, one of those children will stand on the same ‘Last Thursdays with an Entrepreneur’ dais and share his/her success story with a young audience and motivate people to make a life-project of their own and live by it.