The Mission

Growing up I was never a doll girl. I didn’t spend hours dressing and re-dressing, brushing hair and hosting tea parties; instead, I was all about the teddy bears. When I was young (okay, a teenager) I used to collect bears. I worked at a toy store in high school and the job fed my existing love of plush toys to an out of control level. They absolutely overwhelmed and littered my bedroom, until I inevitably left home for university at 18.

In the near decade since I moved away from home, my mother has been bugging me about what I am going to do with the occupying force the near two hundred bears have become in her basement. I haven’t been able to decide. I didn’t want to sell them, or just bring them to a second hand store. They had been important to me, and while I knew that there was no way I could keep them, either at my mom’s house, or in my apartment in Ottawa, I didn’t want to give them up without good cause. I wanted them to go to people who would love them even more than I would. I wanted them to go to people who needed them. Finally, Mom and I made a deal.

It was Easter weekend 2013 and I was at home, completing an application for an internship with the United Nations Association in Canada to be a Junior Professional Consultant (or JPC) with the United Nations Development Progamme (UNDP) in Nepal. Mom started hauling the bags and boxes of my bears up from the basement and instructed me to take photos of them, because they had to go.

“Bronwyn, how about: if you get this position, you take 10 of your bears with you and give them to kids there that don’t have anything else. Then, the next developing country you go to you take 10 more, and by the end of your career in development your bears will be spread out all across the world?” It was an idea I’m not sure anyone could argue with. And even if they could, I certainly didn’t want to, I loved it. It was the perfect solution to my teddy bear dilemma. I know how excited I used to be as a child to get a toy. The idea of being able to bring that much happiness to that many children around the world was more than I could have ever hoped my bears could be worth.

So the conditional plan was set, and then, as luck would have it, I did get the JPC position in Nepal, and the plan was put into action. In the week before I left the country for the six month posting I gathered all my bears from the basement and selected the lucky ones for this first phase of my Operation Teddy Bear, stuffed them into a vacuum seal bag, sucked the air out and jammed them into the bottom of my suitcase. Children on Nepal, here we come!

Meet “Team Nepal”