Nepalis romanticize 'America' because they have been bombarded with overglorified images. It is a feeling that is hard to shake off even when living a B-grade lifestyle in the United States.
Every year, about January, YMCA recruiters interview a hundred or so young Nepalis, mostly boys. From among them, a select group of about 30 is chosen to go to the United States to serve as counselors in the many summer camps that are organised for school children in different parts of the country. The Nepali youths have to pay for their own air tickets, but are taken care of once they land at JFK airport by the YMCA's International Camp Counselor Program (ICCP).
There can be no quarrel with the programme, because it provides bright young Nepalis with exposure to American society —except that only a handful of these promising Nepali youth will ever return home. The rest are lost to the American dream machine, transported over by a programme has created a significant drain on Nepal's future brain bank.
The selection process for the youth counselors is such that the best and the brightest produced by Nepal's elite schools, primarily St. Xavier's, St. Mary's and Budanilkantha, are chosen — whoever has not already got scholarships in an American college, that is. From a country where the quality of schooling is abysmal even by South Asian standards, the ICCP makes off with the select top layer on whom the country has spent enormous amounts of scarce resources.