Maggie Doyne and all her friends were about to leave the nest in 2005. As they graduated from high school in New Jersey, they began scattering to different colleges. As each of Maggie’s friends shared what university they would be attending, she had a last-minute epiphany.
She decided to take a gap year.
Gap years can mean a lot of different things: traveling abroad, volunteering, or working to gain professional experience. For Maggie, it meant moving to Northeast India.
For many students of her generation, the lack of technology in Northeast India would have been enough of a culture shock, but Maggie explained in an interview that her parents “were a little bit off the beaten track.” Growing up, she had little, if any, TV and no internet. Maggie called herself lucky. She reminisced about her youth, said she had everything in the world, and loved playing on her soccer team and attending a good public school.
Maggie’s off-the-beaten-track upbringing yielded a road-less-traveled decision. Her choice not only changed her entire life’s trajectory, but it also created a ripple effect beyond her imagination.
Maggie worked in a refugee region, and after a year’s experience, her decision to stay and tackle the challenges she had observed was easy. She moved to Nepal, learned the language, and met Tope Malla. Tope had grown up an orphan in the region of Karnali. Tope told Maggie about his hunger and difficulty as a child. He wanted to return to his home village and give back to kids who were in his position.
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Maggie and Tope decided they would form a home for children and turn what she called “Band-Aid approaches” into a holistic community-driven development in 2007.
“There was this little strip of land for sale,” Maggie said. “It was $5,000. I had been a babysitter in New Jersey, and I had my parents wire my savings to me.” That purchase led to the Kopila Valley Children’s Home.
In 2010, co-founders Maggie and Tope opened a dream school for the region’s most vulnerable children, which they followed with a women’s center and a food and farming group. This incredible story caught the attention of a Canadian filmmaker Jeremy Regimbal, who, for the past nine years, has been capturing this story, and his documentary is called Between the Mountain and the Sky.
Maggie and Jeremy fell in love and eventually had a daughter, Ruby, who fit perfectly into their extended family of orphans. As Ruby was experiencing some of her firsts as a newborn, Maggie and Jeremy dropped off Nisha to embark on a gap year of her own. Nisha was the first child who came to the children’s home. Maggie and Jeremy chuckled that they only had another fifty-three children to go.
You see, the first cohort of children were already out in the world, bringing about incredible change in their own ways and attending some of the most prestigious colleges and universities on scholarships they had earned while attending the school.
Maggie and Tope built more than a home. They cultivated their vision of education, empowerment, and sustainability in Surkhet, Nepal. Today, the Kopila Valley organization encompasses a children’s home, a school serving over 400 students, a women’s center, and a health clinic on the grounds of Nepal’s greenest and most sustainable campus. Their story continues to inspire a global community committed to creating a world where every child is safe, educated, and loved.
Let’s take a page out of Maggie and Tope’s story and ask ourselves how we might respond to an injustice or vulnerability with spontaneity, compassion, or kindness simply because it’s the right thing to do. While your response doesn’t have to be of the same magnitude as Maggie and Tope’s, it’s your response that’s worth remembering.
