Pictured are Chandan Pun and Dinesh Kc, who are visiting the area from Nepal. (Corey Saathoff photo)

Two men from Nepal are visiting the area to spread awareness of their country’s dire situation and meet locals who are helping to change things for the better.

“Nepal is very poor,” Dinesh Kc told the Republic-Times during a Friday office visit. “There is almost no safe drinking water because it is polluted.”

Dinesh started the Promise Children’s Home in Kathmandu, Nepal, which is supported by Hope Christian Church in Columbia through the missionary group Christian Evangelism in Frontier Areas based in Bethalto.
He is making his second visit to the United States. Joining him is fellow Nepal resident Chandan Pun, 33, who is visiting this country for the first time.

Both Nepalese men are speaking at churches around the area to talk about projects that help their people, such as water well projects and an effort to create businesses in Nepal that keeps jobs there.

“Many men leave our country for four or five years to make money for their families, because that’s where they have to go for work,” Chandan said.

Members of Hope Christian Church have donated nearly $30,000 to Nepal over the last five years.

In January 2014, the church funded a medical camp to a remote village in midwestern Nepal. It provided care to 300 villagers in two days.

In July 2015, three months after a devastating earthquake ravaged the country, Hope supplied 1,100 pieces of tin to help put roofs on 110 temporary houses at a village in east Nepal.

This past June, Hope raised funds for the rebuilding of Dinesh’s parents’ home that was destroyed in the earthquake and helped to fund the building of a new Christian church in east Nepal.

Waterloo residents Brock Keckritz, Ralph Axe and Al Felix are members of CEIFA, which was founded in 1990 with a mission to help such third-world countries as Nepal.

For more information on CEIFA, visit www.goceifa.com.

More than 80 percent of the country is Hindu, and another 10 percent of the population is Buddhist. So, Christians are very much the minority in Nepal.

But through the efforts of CEIFA and support from Hope Christian Church, Christianity is catching on.

Keckritz has visited Nepal on four occasions. He went to the childrens’ home that Dinesh founded, and traveled there again on a medical mission in 2014.

“The earthquake was really bad there,” Keckritz said. “About 80 percent of the buildings were damaged.”

Dinesh plans to speak during a September event at Hope, hopeful of a brighter future for his people.