During the “Light for Makalu Valley” project, we spent nearly two months in the villages, sharing everyday life with the people who welcomed us into their homes. We worked together, ate together, and got to know a reality very different from our own. Over time, those places and communities became much more than just a project: they became people, faces, and stories that we will always carry with us.

When we returned to Nepal in January for the Pawakhola project, we realized we didn’t want to simply install a system and leave. We wanted to make room for the voices of those who live every day in these villages, because they are the true protagonists of what we do.

For this reason, Erika Bulian conducted a series of interviews with residents of the villages involved in both the “Light for Makalu Valley” project and the Pawakhola project. Through these accounts, we want to gain a deeper understanding of their culture, their traditions, and their way of life — but above all, to give them the opportunity to tell their own stories, in their own words.

We believe that listening directly to people is the best way to understand the value of a cooperation project. For our supporters, these documentaries offer a chance to see the places and get to know the communities we work with through their own eyes, going beyond photographs and numbers.

The trailer for the first series of documentaries is already available, and in the coming months we will be publishing new episodes on our website, in a dedicated section. This is a project we care about deeply and one we hope to continue in the future, aiming to document every intervention not only from a technical standpoint, but above all from a human one.

If you’d like to join us on this journey and get to know the stories of the people we meet along the way, we invite you to follow SEED of LIGHT’s website, where we will continue to share new documentaries and updates from our projects.

We had been in the valley for a month by then, working on the “Light for Makalu Valley” project. A project born from Daniele Foletti, former president of the Ticino-based association “Mani per il Nepal.” A project that, without exaggeration, not only changed forever the lives of the local communities — people who, until then, had never seen a lightbulb — but also changed ours profoundly. I knew it would be an intense experience, in many ways: physical, cultural, and above all, human. But I never imagined it would be the beginning of something much bigger. Something that, at least for now, I hope will stay with me for the rest of my life. After a month, we had adapted to that reality, with all its hardships and its wonders. And by wonders, I mean above all the people. In the end, it was they who shaped everything that happened next. During the day, we worked on the systems in people’s homes. We learned to communicate without a common language, to share silences that in Europe often feel more difficult, or at least less natural. There, instead, they were simple, spontaneous and often accompanied by a smile. In the evenings, we gathered around the fire, surrounded by total darkness. It was as if the outside world disappeared, and everything existed only within that circle of light. After about a month, something happened that, in hindsight, marked the true beginning of SEED of LIGHT. Ganje Sherpa, the headman of Pawakhola — an isolated village outside the cluster of eight villages covered by the project — came down to our camp to leave us a small piece of paper written in the Sherpa dialect. At first, we couldn’t understand it. Only weeks later, with the help of engineer Bahadur, with whom we had by then built a relationship of trust, were we able to translate it. It was a request. He was asking for help for his village. They wanted to be connected to the electrical grid. The problem was clear: it wasn’t possible to connect them to the existing system. They were too far away. But the real question was different: how could we say no to them? So we didn’t. We hiked up to Pawakhola on foot, hours of climbing uphill, carrying a hand-drawn sheet of paper. A simple diagram, an attempt to explain that we wanted to help them, but that we couldn’t promise anything. We would go back to Switzerland, look for funding, and do everything possible to build a system for them. At first, they understood that we would return the very next day to begin the work. We celebrated together with them in that remote village among the Himalayan mountains. We didn’t have the heart to dampen that enthusiasm.A few weeks later we returned with Bahadur, who explained the situation more clearly. We would go back to Switzerland, raise the funds, and try to complete the project within a year.

Two months later, SEED of LIGHT was born.

Four months later, in Pawakhola, the first lightbulbs were switched on.

For a long time, I carried a specific doubt about humanitarian organisations. Not toward the people who work in them, but toward the very possibility that what they do changes anything. A quiet doubt, one that had built up over time, that no brochure or presentation had ever managed to clear up.

In January, I went to Pawakhola.

It’s a village of about twenty houses in the Himalayan range. Farmers, mostly. The first road reachable by car is seven hours on foot away (much less for locals), along trails with an elevation change of 1,800 meters that become treacherous, especially during the monsoon season. A place the world, until recently, seemed to have forgotten to think about. A place with no electricity. No light.

I was there as a guest of Seed of Light, for the inauguration of their hydroelectric project. What I found there made my doubt irrelevant. In the smiles of those people there was something hard to describe. It wasn’t just gratitude. It was the joy of discovering that you exist in someone else’s eyes, of realizing that the place where you were born or where you live, however remote, is worth reaching. That kind of joy can’t be staged.

That day I understood that action matters. That using what you have, as far as it goes, to improve other people’s lives doesn’t require perfect conditions. It only requires the decision to do it.

But that trip also left me with a question: doing something is already meaningful, but how it’s done is not beside the point.

In the world of sustainability there’s a model that describes the impact of an intervention through three dimensions: environmental, economic, and social. Three overlapping circles, and their intersection is the place where a project stops being a gesture and becomes something lasting. Staying in that intersection is hard. But it’s where it’s worth trying to stay.

In Pawakhola, those circles shared a common center. A plant powered by the river reduces the amount of wood that needs burning and respects a fragile ecosystem. In the valley, electricians were trained, phones can now be charged, and a community that once lived in isolation has opened a crack toward the rest of the world. Young people now have one more reason to stay, in a valley that was slowly at risk of emptying out.

Seed of Light doesn’t claim to be perfect. But it commits to searching for that intersection in every project, to building something that holds up over time, not just in the moment.

I believe in it. I saw it in Pawakhola.