‘Mamu’

On Christmas Day, I watched a replay of the awarding ceremonies of CNN’s Hero of the Year hosted by Anderson Cooper at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. All the finalists, who got a prize money of $50,000 each, transformed lives, and in such an ennobling way as to enable the lives they touched to reach their full potential — for success, for happiness, for peace and contentment.

I was touched by the teacher who risked her life to run a school for girls in Afghanistan, especially in the light of the shooting of a Pakistani girl who defied gender prejudice in order to go to school.

My heart was warmed by two parents — one, a mother from Ohio who established a school to enable kids to learn how to swim after her own son drowned; the other, a father from Montana who created a fund to help teenagers stay away from alcohol till they are 21. The father lost his daughter to a teenaged drunk driver.

Another mother worked for the protection of young women in Haiti who were being raped in great numbers.

Basnet takes care of Nepalese children whose parents are in prison. www.cnn.com

And there was this lady who matched physically challenged and depressed war veterans with dogs rescued from the shelter — in the end, after her “matchmaking,” you weren’t sure who rescued whom. Master and pet found one of life’s most precious gifts in each other: a friend who loved unconditionally.

But of all nominees, only one made me cry. A single “parent” called “Mamu” by over a hundred children.

Since 2005, 28-year-old Pushpa Basnet of Nepal has assisted more than 100 children of incarcerated parents.

“It’s not fair for (these) children to live in the prison because they haven’t done anything wrong,” Basnet told CNN. “My mission is to make sure no child grows up behind prison walls.”

During a video presentation shown at the awards night, she said that the children are being entrusted to her care at the best time of their lives.

“It is I who is the lucky one,” she said. The video clip ended with her and the children doing a happy dance, a Nepalese Gangnam if you will. Tears came unbidden to my eyes.

“I had a very fortunate life, with a good education,” Basnet told CNN. “I should give it to somebody else.”

According to CNN, Basnet was just 21 when she discovered her calling. She belonged to an affluent family but decided to take up social work in college (just like Sister Marivic Sta. Ana of the Laura Vicuña Foundation, whom I wrote about on Christmas Day).

As part of her studies, she visited a women’s prison and was appalled by the dire conditions. She also was shocked to discover children living behind bars.

One baby girl grabbed Basnet’s shawl and gave her a big smile.

“I felt she was calling me,” Basnet said. “I went back home and told my parents about it. They told me it was a normal thing and that in a couple of days I’d forget it. But I couldn’t forget.”

Basnet decided to start a day-care to get incarcerated children out from behind the prison walls. While her parents were against the idea at first — she had no job or way to sustain it financially — eventually they helped support her. But prison officials, government workers and even some of the imprisoned mothers she approached doubted that someone her age could handle such a project.

“When I started, nobody believed in me,” Basnet said. “People thought I was crazy. They laughed at me.”

But Basnet was undaunted. She got friends to donate money, and she rented a building in Kathmandu to house her new organization, the Early Childhood Development Center. She furnished it largely by convincing her parents that they needed a new refrigerator or kitchen table; when her parents’ replacement would arrive, she’d whisk the old one to her center.

Just two months after she first visited the prison, Basnet began to care for five children. She picked them up at the prison every weekday morning, brought them to her center and then returned them in the afternoon. Basnet’s program was the first of its kind in Kathmandu; when she started, some of the children in her care had never been outside a prison.

Basnet established the Butterfly Home, a children’s home where she herself has lived for the past five years. While she now has a few staff members who help her, Basnet is a very hands-on “Mamu.”

Only Basnet’s story made me cry, but I didn’t know if CNN’s online voters would choose her as CNN’s Hero of the Year (which once was awarded to our very own Efren Peñaflorida, who attended this years awards ceremonies). The others were also deserving of the award.

At the end of the show, I waited with bated breath as I did in the Miss Universe beauty pageant, for the winner’s name to be called. It was a tight fight and without much ado, Anderson called her name: Pushpa Basnet.

When she received her award, she looked at the camera and with tears in her eyes, addressed her incarcerated “children” in Nepal.

“Mamu’s going to take you out from the prison, and you’re coming to my place,” said Basnet, who received an additional $250,000 after being named CNN Hero of the Year.

The world is full of children born in mangers, and is still full of children who sleep in mangers and prison cells and cardboard boxes. Pushpa Basnet has given them a cradle to sleep in. And who was that who once said, “The hand that rocks the cradle….”

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I would like to greet 11-year-old Luis Lucero of De La Salle Zobel, an honor student who was born on Christmas Day, a belated Happy Birthday! He approached me in church and told me he reads my column and he made my day.

It is nice to know that though we may not have the courage and selflessness of many everyday heroes, that we are able to touch lives at a point when we can make a dent, a difference, a new contour in others. Yes, we who are able to transform lives —  not those whose lives we have transformed in big and small ways — are the lucky ones…

(You may e-mail me at [email protected].)