It started off, like a lot of amazing things do, as something totally different than what it became.
In the beginning, the trip Cal State Fullerton professor Jeffrey Kottler took six years ago to a remote area of Nepal was merely a research project with a doctoral student studying maternal mortality. For Kottler, the trip afforded both a chance to supervise the student and, not incidentally, visit an exotic part of the world.
What he found jarred him.
New mothers who might well die in a pool of blood in a barn because no one in a village would go to another town to get help.
He found that local custom put such decisions in the hands of the woman's mother-in-law, who might well prefer that her daughter-in-law die from a difficult pregnancy because it would allow her son to marry a presumably stronger woman for future children.
Not even that was the worst of it, however.
Kottler also discovered that young girls, maybe 10 to 12 years old, simply disappeared from the village. "I started investigating what was going on," he says, "and what I learned was that sex slavers were coming from northern India and either stealing the girls, or in many cases the families were selling the girls because they couldn't afford to feed them."
We'd all be appalled by that, especially because part of the ostensible rationale is that some in India believed that having sex with a virgin would prevent AIDS in men who already were HIV-positive.
Not all of us would do anything about it, however. Especially if we were returning to the comforts of Huntington Beach, as Kottler was.
The man, however, apparently is bred from good stock. "I found this so horrifying," he says. "I had never heard anything so awful in my life. There were literally tears in my eyes when I heard this story. I said to Kieran [his grad student], 'We have to do something about this.' "
They asked the village school principal to identify one girl who was both bright and from the lowest economic class and, therefore, at risk of being sold. He identified a girl named Inu. "I peeled off two 20s and a 10 and gave it to the principal," Kottler says, "and I said, 'This keeps her in school for a year.' "
That's how it started. Kottler has returned each year since. He and Kieran Regmi set up the Medhav Ghimire Foundation, named after Kieran's father, who also happens to be Nepal's poet laureate.
