Thu 7 May 2026 • Nick Kershaw
Five hundred and seventy-nine kilometres
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A seven-year-old, 579 kilometres, and the small charity our runners have funded since 2015.
On 7 December 2025, in a village in Achham, in the far west of Nepal, a seven-year-old girl called Anjali was warming herself near an open cooking fire. It was cold. The other adults in the house had gone out for the morning.
Her clothes caught alight. By the time her parents reached her, she had run to a neighbour’s house with severe burns to both thighs and both legs.
The closest health post is a two-hour walk away, so they carried her on a stretcher. On arrival at the health post they found the kit available was no more than a first-aid kit. So they turned around, and they walked her home.
With no real idea of what options were available, nor an ability to pay for higher-level care, Anjali stayed in the house for 22 days. Her wounds became infected.
After these 22 days, her father took out a loan and put Anjali on an eight-hour bus to Karnali Provincial Hospital in Surkhet. The hospital admitted her, looked her over for five hours, then referred her on. She was loaded onto another public bus and travelled a further 579 kilometres to Kirtipur Hospital, near Kathmandu. The injuries combined with the journey meant that on arrival, Anjali was in an Intensive Care Unit for six days. She was then on General ward for eight more and finally discharged on 22 January 2026.
Through all of that, both of her parents lived in the hospital corridor on half-meals.
This is the first row on a page on my desk that arrived in my inbox this morning.
The page
The page is from our Nepal partner, Burns Violence Survivors, they go by BVS-Nepal. It’s their financial report for the funding provided by Impact Marathon fundraisers for 2025–2026.
That year we were able to send NPR 210,709.38 received in total, about £1,200.
Three patients were supported through this grant. Anjali is the first. The other two are:
Bishnu, 40. A construction labourer from Kohalpur. The sole earner for a wife and four children, all of whom are still in school. He fell from a ladder at a building site in Pokhara, mid-February, into a fire that a colleague had set nearby to stay warm. He lost consciousness for several hours. He was admitted to Gandaki Hospital, but couldn’t pay, and was sent home. He stayed there for six days. After another loan, he travelled through Nepal Medical College and Bheri Hospital, received support and dressings, and finally onto a public bus for 490 kilometres to Kirtipur.
Laxmi, 46. A Newari farmer from Lalitpur, in Bagmati. Distilling traditional ayla on a firewood oven on the morning of 8 January. The metal pot tipped as she was lifting it; hot alcohol spilled onto her right leg. Second-degree burns. She poured water on it, rubbed aloe vera onto the blisters, then got into a taxi to Patan Hospital, seven kilometres away. BVS-Nepal also funded psychosocial counselling alongside the medical treatment.
Below the three patients, a single line: NPR 62,715 for a community awareness programme. BVS-Nepal runs radio jingles and creates Facebook videos to distribute to remote districts about burn safety and burn-related violence. They ask every patient on intake whether they’ve heard them. Most haven’t.
This is one of the videos that grant funded.
In the documents, we then see how the remaining budget is accounted for:
Administration costs came to NPR 21,070.94 (£102)
Which means there is a total remaining: NPR 1,872.44.*
About £10, carried forward into next year.
What the page is for
Most of the work BVS-Nepal does isn’t dramatic. It’s a Nepali NGO with one office in Lalitpur, a small field team, a handful of partner hospitals, and a director called Pratiksha Giri. They take whoever reaches Kirtipur with serious burns, accident, domestic violence, attempted suicide, acid attack, scalding, and they cover surgery, dressings, physiotherapy, nutrition baskets, and counselling. Then they go home and write all this up to ensure donors know exactly where their funding goes.
We do an Impact Week in Nepal each November. We’ve been doing it since 2019. The pop-up athletes’ village goes back up in Batase, at 1,800m, and runners come for a 23km middle distance, a 42km full, and a week with the project.
What the page tells you is the part of the trip that doesn’t show up in photos. We do not photograph this charity or share the photos. But we will share these stories.
When you fundraise as part of your Impact Marathon, NPR 50,975 looks small in pounds, about £290. But for Anjali, from the village of Achham it is the difference between a child losing both legs to infection and a child being discharged in fourteen days.
If your training has been pointing at something this year and you weren’t sure what, let it point here.
The page on my desk is real. Three patients. One small grant.
And we have about £10 left to carry forward.
We need to grow it again.
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Let’s go again.
Let’s run together, with others, for others.
