Towards establishing an academy for homeless street-children

I’m pleased to introduce to you an IT professional & a guest writer – Mukesh Jha. A computer Engineer by profession, Jha is, presently living in the city of Frederick located in the Colorado state of the United States of America. He is founder of the non-profit organization, Developing Hands, working for the betterment of homeless street children.With these few words of introduction, I am inviting Mukesh to write an introductory post under “The guest’s column” of this blog. I hope you’ll all welcome him and encourage him as he takes over...

I born in a small village of Nepal, grew up in the care of my loving parents & schooled in a government school. I had to do a lot of school changes throughout up to the high school period thanks to my brother’s posting at different schools of the Rautahat district. I always managed to maintain a good academic record. As it continues to be the case with most of the government schools in Nepal, I too studied at a school, where English was rarely taught by teachers. Teachers used to teach English in Nepali language and, sometimes, Nepali course was taught in the local language. Even if we learn English at our own hard work, speaking English wasn’t appreciated by the villagers. After completing my high school, I went on to do I. Sc. (Intermediate in Science), before joining the undergraduate course, in Computer Engineering, in Kathmandu. I was fortunate enough to win the EDV Lottery in 2004 and, since then my life took a U-turn. I came to USA along with my wife. I resumed my study in the USA; at Colorado Technical University. Currently, I am working as Network Administrator for Golden Aluminum INC. Before joining my present company, I did work for quite a few larger companies like IBM & Northrop Grumman. I started my career as Remote Desktop Support Tech (Tier 1) in IBM. Sooner I was promoted to the Certified Help Desk Trainer & was responsible to train new Tier 1 & Tier 2 technicians. I am their one of the A+ Hardware Field Technicians. I ended up quitting IBM, as I was on contract with them & wasn’t entitled to many benefits. Then, I moved with Northrop Grumman, worked there for a year and finally moved to the Golden Aluminum where I got hired as permanent employee with all sorts of benefits.


Since my childhood, I had several dreams. Building a school for homeless street children & orphans was one of my most aspired dreams. It would have been very tough for me to realize such a dream but, I was fortunate enough to come to the land of opportunities. After meeting with several American people, I started thinking about one my most aspired dream, which was to do something for orphans. Later in 2005, I was able to come up with the idea of establishing our non-profit organization: Developing Hands. It has an initial goal of building the Developing Hands Academy in Nepal.

Developing Hands has been established with a unique motto. Neither of the board members is being paid nor will be paid in future. All of us are just volunteers for Developing Hands (DH). The main reason of coming to this whole new idea is, all other non-profit organizations they all say they are non-profit but they are utilizing most of the donations in the travels, personal expenses. But Developing Hands is one non-profit organization which is actually a non-profit. All of DH Board members are involved with this great cause just for helping purpose. Now, Developing Hands is in good shape & it has more than 100 volunteers from several parts of the world. We all have a collective dream and we are working hard to materialize it. We will be starting the construction work of DH Academy pretty soon. All of the DH board members will fly to Nepal at their own cost to help build the school along with the help of other American volunteers. The main source of our fund raising is: we do organize 3 or 4 fund raising dinner on yearly basis and all of our board members donate on monthly basis including myself. Most of the time, we spread the word of mouth at our workplace, families & friends asking for help regarding this noble cause.

My parents have generously agreed with us to provide with the required piece of land to build the DH Academy in the Terai region of Nepal. We are also supported by companies like IBM, some other local businesses based in Boulder, Colorado and local people. DH Academy will be a home & school for orphans until their high school stages. The local students will also be admitted to the school upon their interest. As DH Academy will be the English medium school where, all the teachers will be selected by their qualification and most likely will have more American teachers who will wish to volunteer. More information can be obtained by browsing our website.