Our story
It all started in 1998 while Begonia Lopez was on vacation in Bali, Indonesia. Not satisfied with just being a tourist, she decided to do some volunteer work at a local school called Sutha Darma. It was there that she met three handicapped brothers with a disability they called “sensitive bones”. They came from a very poor family and were severely deformed. All of them were in wheelchairs. Over time a beautiful and strong friendship developed. It was from this beginning that Begonia's life changed and Kupu-Kupu Foundation finally emerged.
On her second trip to Bali, Begonia had a little money that she had raised from some friends in Spain. On this trip she visited a school for handicapped children in Bangli. They asked her to buy mattresses for the beds and some school materials. She also saw the condition of the kitchen at the boarding school and was appalled at how it only had a dirt floor and no running water. She talked to the director of the school about how they could organize to build a new kitchen for the children. Students playing on stack of mattresses.
Begonia also went to a hut in Bangli where there were three handicapped young men sleeping on a single mattress on the floor that was dirty and full of holes. She bought some new mattresses and from then on she visited them often to talk about their lives, needs and problems.
Living at that time in Scotland, upon her return from Bali she was completely consumed by what she had seen and how she was going to help. Feeling that she could be more successful at raising funds in her home country, she decided to move back to Spain in order to try to find sponsors for her new projects in Bali. In order to get funding, she found it necessary to set up an NGO and then apply for funds from different Spanish government agencies.
Kupu-Kupu was organized as a local charity on 18th February 2000 in the Basque Country of Spain and registered with the number AS/A/08432/2000. Shortly afterwards, Begonia was successful in getting funding from the City Council of Llodio in the province of Alava, Spain, for her first project, a new kitchen for the handicapped school. In June 2000 Begonia made the ultimate commitment and decided to give up her job and her life in Spain and Scotland and to move permanently to Bali. Since then she has been working for the Foundation on a full-time volunteer basis without any pay.
Initially the Foundation was operating without any formal organization in Bali. In 2002, a Yayasan (the Indonesian form of a foundation) named "LSM Kupu-Kupu Bali" was established to encompass the Foundation's Bali operations. Agung Putradhyana, who was the architect who designed and managed the building of the kitchen school for handicapped located in Bangli, is the Chairman of the Board. Other board members include Bapak Petrus, Ketut and Wayan.