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.