Olga Murray found her purpose in life right before she retired. The now 96-year-old was at the end of her legal career when she took a vacation to a place she’d never been — she traveled to Nepal on a whim.
“The minute I landed I fell in love with the country,” Murray said. “The children, they held my hand, they laughed. They were just so delightful and they wanted to go to school. Most kids didn’t go to school then.”
It was there that she had an epiphany.
“I said, ‘Olga, you know what you’re going to do for the rest of your life? You’re going to educate the children,'” she said.
That started a now 30-year passion building the Nepal Youth Foundation, a nonprofit that combats poverty, builds schools and rescues girls forced into servitude.
“We were going to not be the great white saviors coming in and saving them from this destructive practice. But we would train them to save their sisters, to liberate their sisters,” she said.
The nonprofit has built 72 hospitals and helped educate more than 50,000 kids. But, Murray said, there’s still so much more to be done.
“I don’t think about stopping and, you know, as long as I have my marbles and I’m healthy, I’ll just continue to do that,” she said.
