WHEN Sue Oliver made a one-off $200 donation to a Nepalese family about three years ago, she didn’t realise it would be enough to give them a long-term income.

“It was so easy and the money made such a big difference,” says Sue, 58, of McKellar.

“It went to a shaman and his wife. Their grandson was starting school and it meant they couldn’t be nomadic anymore.

“With the money they bought a buffalo, which goes and services the cows and now that family has an income.”

Sue donated the money through Hari Devkota, the founder of the non-profit organisation High Himalayan Community Projects Nepal, and someone she met on one of her many trips to Nepal.

When Hari told Sue about the family, she was blown away by how so little could make so much of a difference and it got her thinking about what else she could do.

One thing she had been thinking about was what she could do to help women being trafficked.

“They don’t know exactly how many go, but they say about 10,000 are trafficked each year and it all ends up as a bad story for the poor girls,” she says.

“Parents don’t know that’s what’s going to happen. They’re just promised money and jobs.

“There’s plenty of organisations that try and pick up the pieces but the problem in Nepal is that a lot of the villages won’t have these girls back because of what they’ve been doing.

“I wanted to empower these women and you empower women by helping them create an income.”

In 2017, through her work as a holistic energy specialist, Sue began taking donations.

“I thought: ‘I wonder if there’s other people who would like to support the women?’,” she says.

She began asking people to sponsor the women and she ended up taking a group of eight others to Nepal for about two weeks at the end of March to see the change they’d made.

Each of the nine women donated about $200 and Sue says it was exciting to meet the recipients.

“They all received about $200 and have all gone on to create the business they wanted to create and are very happy with the change in their lives,” she says.

“One of the ladies now has a greenhouse and is growing tomatoes, potatoes and cabbages, another has created a tea shop, another bought goats, another wanted to fix up her tea house, which she has done, so all in all I was very excited and happy to see how much had been achieved by sponsoring the ladies.

“They’ve all done amazing things. If somebody hadn’t given them a hand they wouldn’t have been able to.

“So much is in the hands of men in Nepal, so when you empower women, you can also change a lot of imbalances.

“They don’t need to be told what to do, they need to make a choice about what they can do for themselves.

“It’s not about continuing to give them money but empowering them to get on with their lives properly.

“My whole idea is if you actively help women become more financially independent, then the whole trafficking problem in time will go away because there won’t be this desperate poorness everywhere.”

Sue hopes to go again next year and says people are more than welcome to come if they sponsor one of these women.

“I’m not a charity and I don’t want to be a charity, but I see how easy it is to make a difference and to make a difference to someone else’s life is awesome,” she says.

High Himalayan Community Projects Nepal, hhcpn.org