Nepal earthquake aid goes from Winter Park to Kathmandu

In her Winter Park condo, retired businesswoman Micheline Kramer keeps a poster-sized photo of her many children propped on a dining-room chair. She points to a 7-year-old sporting a ponytail and a gray hoodie.

"She wants to be a doctor," Kramer says of the girl. "And that one" a boy in a soccer jersey and glasses "he wants to be a hotel manager."

Others are would-be architects, singers, farmers and CEOs and even a couple who list their career aspiration as "dreamer." Nearly 100 in number, the children are not Kramer's by birth, of course. They are hers by sense of purpose.

Founder of the nonprofit Himalayan Youth Foundation, Kramer has made it her mission to help the children of Nepal by giving them a home, an education and the knowledge that someone cares about them.

Many had already lost one or both parents, even before the 7.8-magnitude earthquake on April 25 left more than 8,000 people dead.

"They call me 'mom,' and they need their mom to be there," she says, packing two giant duffel bags, one devoted solely to supplies. "They are so afraid. They are still having 10 aftershocks every day. And they never know if it will be a little one or a big one. And all of them have [extended] family in the villages in the mountains and don't know whether those relatives are still alive."

Kramer, 72, a former land developer and art dealer who fell in love with Nepal on her first visit in 1993, will return this week, despite the 7.3-magnitude aftershock early Tuesday, to bring supplies and comfort. She is due to arrive in Kathmandu Friday.

With support from several dozen Central Florida residents, who each sponsor a child or two in the home outside Kathmandu that Kramer manages, she has housed 127 kids, from age 6 to 18, including 25 now attending college. Though the valley has not taken a direct hit from the quake and its aftershocks, the home's three buildings are cracked and damaged. The solar panels are gone. The water-purification system ruined.

The children are traumatized.

In the days after the first quake, her charity rented a helicopter to check on the closest villages, looking for relatives. The photos emailed back by the staff showed expansive piles of rubble and little sign of life. The roads themselves have become impassable.

"I was so worried when I couldn't get any news," says Annetta Igou, a Winter Park interior designer who has sponsored a student in Nepal since he was in grade school. Now 19, the young man attends a university in Nepal. It was three days before he could send a message to Igou.

"If it hadn't been for you," he wrote through Facebook, "no one else would be looking for me."

Since launching the foundation in 2002, Kramer has gradually recruited a growing band of supporters, both across the U.S. and in Britain, where there is a branch of the charity run by her son. Neither of them, nor any other administrator, takes a salary. The annual budget is $340,000.

"You just keep hoping everyone is OK," says Gary Sorensen, who owns a direct-mail insurance company in Winter Park. He was persuaded to become a sponsor, at $1,600 a year, while on a Colorado ski-lift with Kramer more than a decade ago.

His "boy" will head to college next year to study Internet technology.

Brad Blum, a Winter Park businessman and philanthropist, was so moved by Kramer's passionate pitch about the children that he became a director on the foundation board and is joining her in Nepal later this week. He also will meet the two children he has sponsored since 2012 a girl who wants to be a doctor and a boy who wants to be a chef.

"His" children are safe, but information on their relatives is still trickling in.

"There have been some heartbreaking stories," he admits. "But there is also a lot of hope."

The Himalayan Youth Foundation is campaigning to raise $20,000 on CrowdRise.com to restore the home and help the children's families and villages. But Kramer also has a contingent offering more personal support.

In one of the duffel bags are 150 hats knitted by a half-dozen women in her condominium complex. Some, including retired school teacher Pamela Sherry, 70, had become pen pals with a child in Nepal and knitted their caps to order.

"I selected a girl who is an orphan, 14 years old, and I first wrote to her in December and just got a letter back that I absolutely treasure," Sherry says. "Every knit, every pearl, I thought of her."

ksantich@tribpub.com or 407-420-5503. For more information or to donate, go to hyf-us.org/.

Copyright 2015, Orlando Sentinel

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