In 2008 the crash took everything we had built. A lawyer and friend, Daniel Nassie, made Aaron an offer: help raise money for an orphanage he was building in Nepal, a place called Rainbow House, and get on a plane to see it. Aaron went, mostly because he had nowhere else to be.

The kids called him brother. He took them out for pizza and ice cream and watched children taste ice cream for the first time. And by a river he saw two small girls fighting over scraps in a heap of garbage, to stay alive one more day. Whatever had been lost at home was survivable after that.

He flew home and told Debbie she had to come. She did not want to go. When she walked through the gate at Rainbow House, the children were holding up a banner they had painted by hand. It said: Debbie ma'am, will you please be our mom?

She stayed.

Eighteen years

The Center for Global Change was founded that year to pay for what the kids needed: a safe home, school, health care, and someone who shows up. We have helped raise those children since, put them through the best schools in the country, and watched them grow into adults who are now the future of Nepal.

The photo on this post is the Rainbow House family in 2013, on the steps of a temple in Bhaktapur. We do not name the children on this site. They are grown now and they have their own lives. But they are the reason everything else here exists.

What it turned into

Along the way the charity became the way our friends and clients could help too. That paid for more than half a dozen medical and dental camps in the Himalayas, treating thousands of people who had never seen a doctor or a dentist, in villages a long walk from any road.

And now it is paying for a rebuild. The flood of August 2026 took homes from some of those same families. In March 2027 we go back to build one.