Sanjna Selva (@therealsanjna) has just celebrated her twentieth birthday but has achieved much within her young age. On a gap year after graduation from high school, Sanjna is now a committed volunteer and social media correspondent for Nepal Peace Home (@nepalpeacehome), an orphanage dedicated to providing care for Nepalese children affected by war and earthquake tragedy.
She has been living in Nepal for the past four months documenting the lives of the community she works with while engaging in development projects in the rural district of Sarlahi – Nepal’s poorest district.
Living in rural Sarlahi comes with many challenges, namely combating electricity and water shortages and battling illnesses despite the scarce medical facilities available. “I wanted to step outside my bubble of privilege and learn more about the world around me. To me, taking a gap year was a way for me to give back in the little ways I could.” She is now working together with 100cameras (@100cameras), a social enterprise based in the USA, to launch a community project combining photography with storytelling.
The social project will empower the children she works with to use photography as a medium to capture their lives and share their stories with the world in the most authentic ways.
In addition, the photographs they take will be turned into sellable projects, with proceeds going directly back into funding the necessities they need – a chain of self-sustainability. “This will teach these children that they too have the power to impact their own lives for the better,” she says.