HAPPY NEW YEAR 2023
Heartfelt thanks to everyone who supports the Irma Romagnoli Foundation

In November 2022, I accompanied a group of 32 naturopathic wellness practitioners on an advanced training course at a traditional Ayurvedic medicine laboratory in Kathmandu, Nepal.
I asked the students to bring children’s clothes, and they brought a “truckload”; notebooks, crayons and pencils, and three full bags arrived; and essential medicines, including antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, antidiarrhoeals and cortisone for children, of which they brought many.
After the course, in early December, I spent a week in a mountain village in Ramechhap, three hours by car from Kathmandu (nine hours by bus), at the home of a dear Nepalese friend’s mother. In this part of Nepal, a road, entirely unpaved, arrived only a few years ago. It is a place of great peace, set against the endless Himalayan range. People here were isolated until a few decades ago and developed food self-sufficiency, but young people have recently begun moving abroad or to the cities because there are no opportunities to pursue work other than farming.
Until 2019, the Irma Romagnoli Foundation funded a project supporting the education of 10 girls and 10 boys in need at the Jesuit S. Javier school in Kathmandu. That project has ended.
My visit to Hiledevi was also intended to identify an opportunity to help children directly in visibly impoverished areas of the country.
With the help of Kapil, a longstanding Nepalese friend, and the local schoolteacher, Mr Nema Lama, we delivered clothes to the village’s primary and secondary school. The teachers undertook to distribute them to the neediest families. We also delivered notebooks and pens of every kind, and, as a doctor, I explained the correct use of the medicines. Finally, with the school council, we considered supporting children who, after completing free secondary schooling, have the ability and desire to study but cannot continue because their families are poor. We also asked them to consider and tell us about any other needs the school might have.
I believe it is extremely valuable to go directly into the community, and that the Irma Romagnoli Foundation will seriously consider continuing to help Nepalese children.

Thank you,
Erus Sangiorgi
President of the Irma Romagnoli Foundation