At KSC, Nepali woman details efforts to bring higher education to thousands

Sep. 29—A woman who's led more than 3,500 young women from her home country to higher education shared her story at Keene State College Wednesday, which four of her students have called a second home.

In an evening lecture at Alumni Hall, Usha Acharya, a Nepali woman and co-founder of the Little Sisters Fund, spoke about her background and why she created the fund, a scholarship program that aims to finance a college education for Nepali students at institutions in the U.S. and other countries. Keene State is one of four American colleges to facilitate the program.

Jayaraj Acharya, Usha's husband, also gave remarks. Jayaraj is a lecturer at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, Nepal, a former professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and served as Nepal's ambassador to the United Nations from 1991-94.

"We started along with a friend, Trevor Patzer, in late 1998 with a few girls," Usha said ahead of Wednesday's lecture. "It's now more than 3,500 girls [that] have participated. We select the poor and underprivileged girls, those who cannot go to school because of poverty and hardness."

Usha said she grew up in a remote, mountainous farming village in Nepal. She said many of her friends were married before they turned 10, and that after her siblings died, her parents blamed "badly positioned planets" and wanted to get rid of her.

A cousin of Usha's and his wife took her in at age 9, where she had the opportunity to enter public school.

"That was when I saw the English alphabet for the first time," Usha said in her lecture. "I struggled a lot in school, but I passed all the exams and eventually graduated from high school, surprising everyone around me. I wanted to be a schoolteacher; that was my only ambition that motivated me to study."

After earning a bachelor's degree in economics in 1968, she received a scholarship from the government of India to study for a master's degree in Delhi. In 1981, she married Jayaraj, arranged by the couple's families, and the two moved back and forth from Nepal to the U.S.

In the 1990s, Usha said she became involved in social activism for young women and children in Nepal and produced reports on the country's child labor and girls' trafficking issues for the International Labour Organization.

"Although I found research and project work valuable, its impact on human lives was more indirect than I had wished," Usha told the audience. "I ... decided to start my third career focused on educating Nepali girls. My American friend, Trevor Patzer, was visiting Nepal at that time and offered to pay for a Nepali girl to go to school. His enthusiasm and energy, together with my knowledge of Nepal culture and girls' issues, led us to start the Little Sisters Fund."

Usha said students selected for the program attend public and private schools across 22 districts of Nepal and are supervised by 28 coordinating mentors who are alumnae of the program. She said there have been more than 1,000 graduates since Little Sisters' founding who have earned degrees in nursing, education, engineering and a variety of other fields. The program is funded by individuals and foundations and also generates some of its income from dividends and interest. In 2021, the Little Sisters Fund had a total income of just over $800,000, with 59 percent of that number coming from foundations, 36 percent from individual donors and 5 percent from dividends and interest, according to an annual report.

Two Little Sisters students were present for Wednesday's lecture.

Nirmala Tamang, 20, from the Sindhupalchowk District of Nepal, is a Keene State sophomore who studies computer science. She said her involvement as a student with the fund is "... a story of gratitude," hailing from a district she said is among the most notorious for the rate of girls who are trafficked.

"Little Sisters has been the backbone of what I am right now," Tamang said before Usha's lecture. "From when I started grade two [on], I completed high school with the help of the fund."

Tamang said she attended a community college in Nepal in pursuit of a business degree, but she leapt on the chance to study at Keene State, where she discovered her current program after exposure to a wider range of degrees.

"Nepal is a very male-dominated society, and we [women] are definitely deprived of so many opportunities in comparison to men," she said. "That's what this fund is all about: empowering women through education. I would say it's not just a fund, it's a family."

Len Fleischer, a retired education professor at Keene State, helped connect Usha with the college after her homeland was devastated by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in April 2015. Fleischer said he recalled meeting the Acharyas in Nepal during that time.

"It was a desperate situation in all kinds of ways including education, because there were approximately 10,000 schools that were just completely flattened in that earthquake," he said. "We talked about the possibility of establishing something with Keene State and a partnership to give gifted and deserving students like Nirmala an opportunity to study in the U.S."

Fleischer said it was thanks to work with previous Keene State President Anne Huot and current President Melinda Treadwell that the program came to fruition.

Slesha Tuladhar, 22, from Kathmandu, is the other Little Sisters-backed student at Keene State. She's a senior who's pursuing dual degrees in architecture and product design as well as a minor in business studies. As her parents' third child, Tuladhar said her family couldn't afford to pay for her higher education, but with the help of the president of her school she learned of the Little Sisters Fund.

"Even if they cannot afford getting us into school, I'm pretty sure [my parents] would have pushed us harder into getting education," she said. "They were very excited about me getting this opportunity."

Tuladhar said being supported by the Little Sisters Fund helped her channel her passion for creativity into a degree program that suited her, since her siblings' paths into computer science and logistics weren't what she was looking for.

"If I were to pinpoint one career I would want when I graduate, it would be traveling the world creating buildings, but also creating spaces for a cause, for bigger problems," she said. "I went back [to Nepal] last winter and ... the monuments, buildings and structures out there are so much different from what I've been learning on campus."

She had but one sentence to say for Usha.

"You're one heck of a woman," Tuladhar said.

Trisha Nail can be reached at 352-1234, extension 1436, or tnail@keenesentinel.com. Follow her on Twitter at

@byTrishaNail.