Hannah Potter, a senior art major from Lincoln, Neb., spent six weeks in Nepal this summer with the Tiny Hands International Summer Vision Team, on a trip that has changed her life, which was supported with a grant from the Hixson-Lied Endowment.
“It was just a really growing and life-changing experience,” Potter said. “I feel really blessed to have been able to go and be a part of it. I feel like it has confirmed and shaped what I’ll look for in the future, in terms of how to incorporate the things I’m passionate and excited about.”
Tiny Hands International is a Christian non-profit focused on fighting sex trafficking and working with orphans in South Asia. Potter became introduced to the organization after working on a project for them in an advertising class during her junior year. The organization estimates that 10,000-15,000 girls are trafficked from Nepal to India every year.
“Once you hear about it, you can’t not do something,” Potter said.
She heard about the organization’s summer trips and decided to apply. Around 80 to 100 people from around the country apply each year, and nine were selected this past summer on her team.
“I just think there’s something intrinsic when someone’s identity is taken away, and when that is wrapped up into a kind of physical commodity almost that just really broke my heart,” Potter said. “These are not things that are personal choices. When you see that brokenness or injustice, there’s just a desire for that to be set right.”
She arrived in Nepal on July 25. The first three weeks were spent learning about the country and the issues first-hand. They visited culturally relevant sites and nine children’s homes and also went to one of the border monitoring stations on the Nepal-India border, which included a visit to a safe house. Within the last 30 days before they toured a border control station, that station had intercepted 73 girls. They were based in Kathmandu, but also visited children’s homes in Pokhara and Chitwan.
“When we first got into the taxi, it was like, ‘Oh my goodness,’” Potter said. “It was just pretty chaotic. At first, it was a lot to take in, especially when you have street vendors coming up to talk to you or you have street kids who ask for money or beggars on the street. You want to think that you will know how to respond in those instances. But I think when you go there and everything is so overwhelming, it was an overwhelming feeling of feeling so helpless.”
Seeing the street kids was especially heartbreaking.
“Most of the street kids don’t have homes. Some do, but they have chosen to run away and live on the streets. And they have these little plastic bags of glue that they sniff, which is a gateway to using heroin,” Potter said. “The image that conjures up in American’s minds is, ‘Oh, they are these rebellious teenagers, 16-20 years old.’ But there are a lot of street kids who are like five years old. There’s not really a context where that fits in our minds.”
Another heartbreaking moment was seeing a small baby, around one or two years old, who was missing three of its limbs, begging on the street.
“It had just been set there on the mat with a bowl for money,” Potter said. “It was particularly heartbreaking because you know there’s someone who’s feeding this child and just keeping it alive just enough to make money. It’s a heart-wrenching image. Just to know there’s someone who has that brokenness to feel the need to do that and is in such a broken situation that it becomes okay.”
After learning about the issues, Potter spent the next three weeks working on her own project when participants were prompted top pick an aspect of Tiny Hands’ work to immerse themselves in. She became interested in learning more about the education system in Nepal, which focuses on rote memorization instead of critical thinking, including in the teaching of art. Potter wanted to incorporate a more creative approach to art in the schools.
“Most of the art they do in the classrooms is just copying exactly something like a Disney coloring sheet. And they can copy them very well, but for them to come up with something on their own has a lot more potential to stimulate that creativity,” Potter said.
So she helped students create a mural at one of the children’s homes in Kathmandu, Nepal. She purchased two, seven-foot by four-foot wooden boards and painted a Nepali, brightly colored landscape.
“Then, I did an art activity with the kids where I cut out different shapes of birds out of a construction paper cardstock,” Potter said. “And then we did a lesson that talked about pattern and different types of pattern.”
The children created different patterns to decorate their birds and make them their own. Potter laminated the birds and hung them from the top of the mural so they hung down over the painted landscape.
“I had taken the Art in the Community class [at UNL] before I went, and Professor Sandra Williams and I talked a lot about how a lot of times with kids, their sense of art is a piece of paper that might get thrown away, might get stuck up on the refrigerator for a little bit, but then stuck in a folder somewhere,” Potter said. “But for them to see their work in a more permanent setting that’s going to be on display for anyone who comes to the house, I think that developing that sense of stability was a good step in that direction.”
The best feeling she had was seeing the kids interact with the mural when it was installed.
“The kids were just really enthusiastic and really willing to engage with it,” Potter said. “Probably delivering the mural and getting to work with the kids to each hang their bird on the top of this mural, it was probably one of my top-five life moments. There was a little Nepalian village we painted on the bottom, and we had painted one of the houses to look like their house. So you live here and we live here. They would have their fingers walk along the mural. As we did the birds, they were flying the birds around outside and making them fly. They definitely took a sense of personal ownership. Just to see them engaged with it was even more than I had expected.”
Williams was pleased that Potter received a Hixson-Lied Study Abroad Support Grant to help her make the trip to Nepal.
“Art in the Community students are introduced to grant writing, and we were able to help Hannah support her scholarly and creative research by advising and mentoring her through the grant writing procedure,” Williams said. “This type of transdisciplinary research that involves study across the humanities showcases the exemplary work that our students do. Hannah Potter is, of course, a student of significant merit and ongoing potential—but certainly our student body is comprised of informed, motivated, driven young people committed to contributing to the common good. I look forward to working with those that follow in her footsteps, since it is clear that she is a leader.”
Following her return to the U.S., Potter participated in an exhibition at the Rotunda Gallery in the Nebraska Union in September titled “Art Without Walls.” She created two posters on sex trafficking and the mural project, as well as a collage of journal pages and drawings she completed in Nepal.
“We put together an exhibition centered around the idea of community and what it looks like to do art within the context of community,” Potter said.
Potter said she learned a lot from this experience.
“It was rewarding for me. Even just to realize my own limitations and my own brokenness as well,” she said. “I think sometimes it’s easy to go to Nepal and say, ‘Look at all the things that are wrong with Nepal,’ but to realize there is brokenness in my own life. It might look different, but that root is still the same. But then that doesn’t mean that I don’t have the chance or ability to respond—even if it’s just a mural. That’s not necessarily going to dramatically change the entirety of Nepal, but I do have the ability to do the small things.”
Potter paraphrases a favorite quote from Mother Teresa, saying, “I might not be able to do these great things, but I do have the ability to do small things with great love.”