YOU Can Do Anything! Why Not Change The World? Winner of the CNN Hero of the Year Award, Maggie was just an average gap year student trying to find her way in the world when she came across something she could never un-see. This is how one girl single-handedly changed the lives of hundreds with this one thought: "Forget the 80 million, start with one".
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00:00 How does a 23-year-old American girl from New Jersey,
00:05 college-bound four years ago,
00:07 end up in a remote Himalayan village
00:10 raising over 200 children who have been orphaned
00:12 as a result of disease and civil war?
00:15 My story began exactly five years ago
00:19 when I woke up one morning at 18 years old
00:23 and had a scary realization.
00:26 I knew very little about myself
00:28 and what I wanted in my life.
00:30 So I packed up a backpack with very few belongings
00:35 and I decided to take a trip around the world.
00:37 I had never really traveled, never left my country.
00:40 All of a sudden, my whole world opened up.
00:42 There was so much to learn and so much to discover
00:46 outside of the walls of a four-walled classroom.
00:49 I was walking down the road one day
00:52 when I locked eyes with this little girl.
00:55 Her name is La Cora.
00:57 Her job every day was to take loads
01:00 from the bus park all the way into the villages
01:03 and she'd go back and forth, back and forth all day.
01:05 She'd make a dollar, two dollars in the day
01:07 to feed her family.
01:09 This is the life of a Nepalese orphan.
01:11 I looked at her and I saw every single piece of myself
01:15 and I was devastated.
01:19 I thought, what have we done as a human family
01:23 that our children are living this way?
01:25 (gentle music)
01:27 I soon kept reading and I found out
01:30 that there were 80 million children
01:32 just like her in the world and I was devastated.
01:36 And then I met one particular girl.
01:39 Her name was Hema and this is Hema here.
01:41 She was seven years old but every day
01:43 when I walked to meet her, she'd just smile
01:46 with these big, bright eyes and she'd say,
01:47 "Namaste, Didi," and I thought for the first time,
01:50 "Okay, Maggie, forget the 80 million.
01:52 "What if you just started with Hema?
01:54 "Is there something that you can do
01:55 "to change the life of just one child?"
01:57 And I thought at 18 and as the entrepreneurial mind
02:00 that I have, okay, I can do that.
02:03 What if I just supported the education of this one child?
02:05 How would her life change?
02:07 And this is Hema a couple weeks later.
02:10 I put her into school and followed and tracked her progress.
02:15 But the sad thing was that I didn't think it was enough.
02:20 There were kids that didn't have homes and families
02:22 and they were orphans and one day I had this idea.
02:27 I found a piece of land and it just happened
02:30 to be $5,000 and I wanted to build a home for orphan kids,
02:35 a home and then a school and a base.
02:37 I called up my parents and I said,
02:40 "Can you send me over my $5,000 of life savings?"
02:44 I had saved up from the time I was about six years old,
02:46 every penny I'd babysat starting from the time
02:48 I was 12 to when I was 18 and sure enough,
02:51 they wired over that $5,000 and I bought
02:54 my first piece of property in Nepal.
02:57 The world will change when our children
03:14 and our women are educated.
03:16 They have less children, they raise better families,
03:19 they raise more educated children, their disease,
03:21 everything decreases, poverty levels,
03:24 communities and villages change.
03:26 And the thing about this work that I do
03:27 is that it's very addicting.
03:28 So I thought, okay, one kid, if I could do one, why not 10?
03:32 What if my dream was to walk across this dry riverbed
03:35 one day and not see a single child breaking stone?
03:38 That's what I want.
03:39 I want to create a world that I want to see every day
03:42 and I think we have the power to do that.
03:44 I don't think you have to go 8,000 miles away
03:47 to the foothills of the Himalayas.
03:48 I think the beauty of all of us is that we have talents
03:52 and we have gifts and this just happened to be mine
03:56 and I'm really lucky to have found it
03:57 and created my little slice of heaven, my little paradise.
04:00 And I think that the world will change
04:02 when we all find that for ourselves,
04:04 where we wake up every day and we wouldn't rather
04:06 be anywhere else in the world doing any other kind of work.
04:11 We think of all the things we don't have
04:13 instead of the things that we do have.
04:15 Oh, I could do that if I had more money
04:17 once I have my PhD, after I'm settled,
04:19 after I'm established, after I'm famous.
04:22 Well, what if everything you had
04:23 was everything you have right now?
04:26 Your body and your mind and that sense of I can do anything.
04:31 (inspirational music)
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05:20 [BLANK_AUDIO]