School’s In For Summer

School’s In For Summer For two years Shivani Sharma, 8, (in purple, raising her hand) has attended a Nepalese School started by Lions. The school is a place for her to connect to her roots and meet others with the same cultural background. Here she’s learning how to combine the letters of the Nepalese alphabet […]

Finding Home

HOW A NEPALESE DIASPORA COMMUNITY IN CALIFORNIA FOUND THEIR ROOTS AGAIN IN LIONS. It was under a banyan tree that it all began. In the town where Rajen Thapa grew up in Eastern Nepal there was no football field, no tennis court, no swimming pool – just the banyan tree. In the evening, after they […]

Catching Frogs

An hour or so after arriving at summer camp, seven-year-old Brian* is in tears. Spotting Kathy, Brian launches himself into her arms, repeating, between choked sobs, “I want to go home.” Kathy has a son named Brian, but he isn’t the blond little boy who has wrapped his arms around her – he is the […]

A Noble Cause

Pat Lalor’s family has been farming in Ireland for a very long time – since 1844 to be exact. “It’s what we’re best at,” says Lalor, a slim 72-year-old organic oat farmer. Ireland is known for small-scale farming, with an average farm size of just about 80 acres according to the country’s national statistical office. […]

Leaving It All Behind

Liz McMillan was at a community event in Ashburton District, New Zealand, about an hour’s drive from Christchurch, when she heard the news. A white supremacist had attacked Muslim worshippers at two mosques in New Zealand’s second largest city of Christchurch on the South Island, killing 51 people and injuring dozens more. The gunman, Brenton […]

From the Ashes

It was after her husband died in 2015 that Karen Crook became a Lion, at least that is the official story. But it really goes back to her parents – and Paradise. That is the name of the Northern California town located in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range where Crook’s parents moved […]

Pride in the Valley

A black sheep leads the quest to make sure everyone is all right. Joyce Bergshoeff is a fast talker. Open and warm, the 48-year-old nurse and mother of three gushes the way proud mothers often do when describing their children. Growing up, her eldest child was “brilliant, very outgoing, a concert cellist.” It is the […]