Tipperary man's ashes were scattered in Nepal, the country where he helped to transform lives

A Clonmel man who made the mountainous state of Nepal his second home left an immense humanitarian legacy, one whose impact is impossible to measure, and which has transformed the lives of so many people in the Asian country.

For a period of 15 years before he passed away in June 2021, Stephen O’Brien from Davis Row, Clonmel made several trips to Nepal, where he first worked as an English teacher, before devoting his time as a volunteer to establish pre-schools and centres for disabled children in the impoverished country.

This incredible gift that he gave was witnessed first-hand by his niece, Caitriona O’Donovan, who spent three weeks in Nepal last December. Caitriona is the daughter of Stephen’s sister, Maureen O’Brien, who has lived with her husband Sean O’Donovan and family in Howth, Dublin for many years. Stephen’s other sibling, his younger brother Michael, lives in Leixlip, Co Kildare.

“It was a long-awaited trip, something that was always on my agenda,” says Caitriona.

“I had hoped to travel to Nepal with Stephen and work on the projects with him”.

However, the demands on her time as she ran her own healthcare business meant that uncle and niece never managed to make the trip together, although Caitriona had contributed towards the fundraising efforts that helped Stephen establish such vital educational and healthcare infrastructure in Nepal.

When she finished up in the business last October, Caitriona felt that the time was right to finally travel to Nepal and bring Stephen’s ashes with her. She was accompanied by her very good friend, Alice Lucey, whose sister Aoife was a great friend of Stephen and a volunteer on his projects.

“It was a privilege to be there and I couldn’t have been prouder. I was beyond proud and it was emotional to see what Stephen had achieved,” says Caitriona.

Above: “He is missed so much over there, he was considered a saint,” Caitriona O’Donovan says about her uncle Stephen O’Brien (above)

She and Alice based themselves in Bhaktapur, Nepal’s most densely populated city and a UNESCO World Heritage site about ten miles from the capital Kathmandu.

During his early years in Bhaktapur, Stephen became aware that there was no pre-schooling in the state schools, which in turn resulted in low academic standards in those schools. With both parents working to make ends meet, older children, especially girls, are often unable to attend school because they have to stay at home and look after their younger siblings.

However, the 12 nurseries (with Montessori programmes) that he founded changed all that in Bhaktapur.

“People in Nepal see education as an avenue,” says Caitriona O’Donovan.

“It’s a way out to better opportunities, often overseas, and that is what Stephen gave them. Education means freedom, especially for women”.

“It was very much about educating girls. In Bhaktapur, the likelihood otherwise is that they’ll end up in the sex industry in Bangkok”.

Stephen also established a day care centre for disabled children in Bhaktapur called Satprayas.

Mukunda Manandhar, a Nepalese friend of his, and the manager of a small guest house, told Stephen about Swanti, his eight-year-old daughter who had such severe cerebral palsy that she could not talk or even sit up. He asked Stephen for help to establish a day care centre for her and the many more disabled children in Bhaktapur and the surrounding villages.

During his years in Nepal, and his earlier travels in India, Stephen wrote about his experiences in the course of several articles that were published in The Nationalist.

Writing about the day care centre, he said “Satprayas is a Nepalese word that roughly translates to endeavour or to struggle, which fairly accurately describes not only the struggles we had against prejudices to set up the centre but the much more titanic struggles that the children and their parents face day by day.

“You don’t want to be born disabled in Nepal, it’s a Hindu country that believes in reincarnation and with a strong sense of karma. What you sow you reap, and if you’re born disabled it means you led a bad life the last time around and now it’s restitution time, so don’t go looking for sympathy because you’re going to have a hard job finding it.

“Disabled people are bad luck to be around, so are kept out of sight and out of mind, in the back rooms, in the dark rooms, where no one will look. If a family has four children and one is disabled, they will tell you they have three children”.

Some rooms, including one that housed two goats and had straw on the floor, were scrubbed, cleaned and painted in bright colours until they were eventually fit for purpose.

Money was “scraped” together to pay staff half of their agreed salary, and the exhaustive work of Stephen and others eventually bore fruit.

Above: Caitriona O'Donovan (left) and Alice Lucey during their trek up the Himalayas

“The number of patients now on the register is about 34 and the number attending each day is usually between 22 and 25.

The total annual cost now of running Satprayas is just about €10,000, with €4,500 coming from our friends in Switzerland and

almost exactly the same amount coming from supporters in Ireland and the UK, with the remaining €1,000 made up of small monthly fees paid by some of the families, and also the ten percent service charge which is still coming from the guest house where Mukunda works”, Stephen wrote at the time.

An NGO called The National Rehabilitation Society for the Disabled, mainly funded by the Mormon Church in Utah, supplied 13 state of the art wheelchairs, as Satprayas began to take shape.

The centre, which moved to a better building in 2014, provides transport to and from the children’s homes as well as physiotherapy, speech therapy, occupational therapy and two meals a day. There are also educational facilities, wheelchairs or other mobility aids as required, home support in the form of occupational materials, and medical checks by specialist doctors.

Caitriona O’Donovan and Alice Lucey also met Stephen’s good friend Sarjani, the principal of Niketan School in Bhaktapur, which is one of the first schools in which Stephen helped establish a pre-school, or nursery, back in 2008.

“Whenever Stephen’s name was mentioned, tears would flow,” says Caitriona.

“He is missed so much over there, he was considered a saint. He was described as wise, compassionate, humble, humorous, fair and empathetic. They knew Stephen as well as we knew him. The impact that he had and continues to have is phenomenal”.

Above: Caitriona O’Donovan with children in one of the pre-schools established by the late Stephen O’Brien

Caitriona brought some of Stephen’s ashes to Bhaktapur and scattered half of them into the Bagmati River, the holy river, at a place where he loved to sit.

“It was beautiful, it felt like he was with us. And knowing Stephen, he would have had a good laugh about it. It was also wonderful that his friends were there and had a chance to say goodbye”.

The remainder of his ashes were brought 4,500 metres up the Annapurna range in the Himalayas on a five-day trek undertaken by Caitriona and Alice.

“It was just stunning, up over the clouds and beyond,” says Caitriona. “When we reached the top we left the rest of his ashes go. As a man who loved the mountains, it was a fitting place to leave him”.

Caitriona’s mother Maureen gave her a stone from the family plot at St Patrick’s cemetery in Clonmel, which she left on the remote mountain top almost 5,000 miles from his home town.

“It was a phenomenal journey and extraordinary to see what Stephen had achieved,” says Caitriona.

“I suspect that I will continue to go back and pick up a bit where Stephen left off. It’s a wonderful place, the mountains are spectacular and I’ve never met anyone like the people. They are the most welcoming, kind, decent and happy. They have real determination, despite the poverty”.

The first of Caitriona’s return trips to Nepal will be made next October, when a foundation will be launched in her uncle’s memory.

Stephen O’Brien last visited Nepal in 2015, the same year the country suffered a devastating earthquake that killed 8,964 people and injured 21,952 more. 300 people died in Bhaktapur, with 2,000 injured, including his friend Sarjani, whose house collapsed on herself and her mother, as they were both buried up to their necks in bricks.

“As soon as he received his diagnosis, he was given between 12 and 18 months to live. He wanted to make one last trip but it wasn’t to be,” says Caitriona.

“He was forever young. We never expected him to go. He was 70 when he died and he had so much more to give and live for. It was such a shock to people in Bhaktapur when they heard the news.

“There are so many people on this earth that you would wish to be like, and Stephen was the person I would most aspire to be.

“He just embodied success. He didn’t want material things.

“He just wanted to give and make a difference to people’s lives, and he did that”.