Heather O’Neal is a townie, born and raised in Ann Arbor. As an Ann Arbor native, she attended Burns Park and Tappan, and graduated from Pioneer High School. After struggling academically in high school, O’Neal applied to over 10 colleges and was rejected by all of them.

“It was very humbling, but I went to Washtenaw Community College, and I loved that place,” O’Neal said. “It turned me all around; I raised my grades, and I went off to [the] University of Wisconsin.”

At Wisconsin, O’Neal majored in English. O’Neal didn’t like to read and thought that being an English major would force her to love reading. While that strategy didn’t entirely work for O’Neal, she did have the opportunity to do her junior year at Wisconsin abroad, and she jumped at the chance. Kathmandu, Nepal, was where O’Neal ended up.

“[It was] as far away as I could get, and I loved it there,” O’Neal said.

O’Neal spent the 1986-87 school year in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, when she was about 20 years old. At the end of her year away from home, O’Neal called her mom from the post office to tell her she wasn’t coming back. O’Neal’s mother forced her to come home, telling her she wouldn’t receive any more money from her parents if she chose to remain in Nepal. Her mother wanted her to finish her degree and told O’Neal she could return to Nepal after graduating.

After a year of immersion in Nepali culture, O’Neal experienced an enormous culture shock when she returned home to Ann Arbor. O’Neal had found Nepali culture fascinating. She loved learning the Nepali language and exploring streets filled with stalls selling beautiful but inexpensive handmade items, which O’Neal was especially drawn to. While she was there, O’Neal kept a detailed journal of her year, which has since been self-published. After finishing her time at Wisconsin, O’Neal was ready to go back to Nepal, this time through the Peace Corps.

The Corps offered her a position in China, which O’Neal reluctantly accepted because she had been waiting for a position for a while. The Corps was pulled out of China after the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre in 1989, and O’Neal took a second proposal from the Corps to work in Hungary. At the time, Hungary had just been liberated from the influence of the Soviet Union, and the so-called ‘Iron Curtain’ that divided the western democracies from the communist Soviet Union and its sphere of influence fell, ending the Cold War.

“I ended up living there for two years, right after the fall of the Iron Curtain,” O’Neal said. “I was [one of] the first Americans behind the Iron Curtain, so we were very famous and popular. I was on national TV, national radio and it was very exciting, but my heart was [still] in Nepal.”

O’Neal spent her time in Hungary teaching and came back to America to participate in a program to earn a Master’s in Education. O’Neal had planned to complete her Master’s in two years, but it ended up taking five because she worked during the day and studied at night. She got a job teaching middle schoolers in El Paso, Texas, on the US-Mexico border. O’Neal’s students were mostly from Mexico, so she taught English as a second language.

O’Neal then attended an international job fair in Carmel, California, where multiple countries were offering English Second Language (ESL) jobs, hoping to finally return to Nepal. As O’Neal scanned the list of representatives, she found that the Nepali job officer’s name was crossed off in pencil. Disappointed, O’Neal got in line for ESL jobs listed in a few other countries and was surprised by five calls back that same day.

“I remember calling my mom again,” O’Neal said. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, what do I do?’ [and] she said, ‘Don’t do anything drastic.’”

It only took O’Neal two weeks of deliberation to accept a position in Spain working at the American School of Madrid teaching ESL. While there, O’Neal befriended a fellow teacher across the hall, and the two bonded over their shared love of Nepal. One day, her friend suggested that the two quit their jobs and leave for Nepal to trek through the Himalayan Mountains.

When O’Neal and her friend arrived, she found that Nepal had changed a lot in the twelve years she had been away. The traffic in Kathmandu was atrocious and respiratory disease was becoming an increasing problem in the community. After taking a flight from Kathmandu into a small town in the Himalayan mountains, O’Neal realized that she didn’t know the area as well as she once did because of how much the country had transformed. As O’Neal and her friend were drinking milk tea at an inn, a man with a strong Irish accent convinced them to enlist some help for their trip.

When O’Neal and her friend asked if anyone could take them into the mountains, an 18-year-old man named Pemba Sherpa volunteered. Pemba took their bags all the way up to the base camp, brought them water and took wonderful care of O’Neal and her friend on their trip. O’Neal didn’t know it at the time, but that first meeting with Pemba was the beginning of a lifelong partnership.

“[Pemba] was amazing,” O’Neal said. “As we were coming back to Kathmandu, I said to him, ‘I’m gonna start a company [to] take people to Nepal, and I want to work with you.’”

After returning to Ann Arbor from her first of many trips back to Nepal, O’Neal was determined to share the culture and the mountains she’d fallen in love with. O’Neal created a travel company and posted signs around the city, hoping for business. O’Neal’s mom was concerned about her new business venture, and after O’Neal got her very first customer,, she too was beginning to feel the pressure.

“[Pemba] hardly had an email address, because it was right at the beginning of emailing,” O’Neal said. “He said, ‘When you fly to the airport, send a note to this email address, and I will meet you on that day.’ I didn’t know who I wrote to, and I remember I had my fingers crossed.”

O’Neal and her first client flew into Lukla, a poor Nepali town with no cars and only a small airport for tourists, to meet Pemba for her business’s first-ever trip to Nepal. Pemba was ready and waiting at the airport, took their bags and helped them along their mountain journey.

“We went off and had a blast,” O’Neal said.

After that, O’Neal would go on to take groups of between two and seven people to Nepal in both the fall and spring. One of her early clients happened to be Marcy Tuzinsky, one of CHS’s current deans, and her husband, Rich. For 11 years, O’Neal brought these groups to experience the joys and wonders of Nepal and the mountains lining its northern border. O’Neal only stopped when her son Kenneth, a current freshman at Skyline High School, was born.

When O’Neal’s groups made it back to Kathmandu, she would shop around and bring beautiful, handmade items home in big duffle bags. O’Neal and Pemba began by selling these items out of their garage, but when Pemba encouraged her to bring their business to Main Street, she listened. Himalayan Bazaar has found a home and name at 218 South Main Street and sells handmade items from the Himalayan region of Nepal.

“My motto was to take you around the world, or bring the world around to you, so that’s what I did,” O’Neal said.

Pemba has also started his own business ventures, and after expanding his world past Lukla and Kathmandu, he moved to Ann Arbor. Pemba started and owns Base Camp, a Nepali and Himalayan restaurant on Jackson Road, and sold his other creation, Everest Sherpa, to a friend. Pemba and O’Neal co-owned Himalayan Bazaar until 2019, when O’Neal sold her half to Pemba to focus on her family.

When O’Neal took her first client to Nepal, she had just started working at the newly installed bells in Kerrytown. For O’Neal, letting people play the bells is a lesson in human psychology. O’Neal has learned to observe different people over the years, finding patterns in how people think and react when asked if they would like to play. While she enjoys it, what O’Neal loves most about her job is the human connection.

“One time, a woman [insisted that she couldn’t play] and I said ‘Just try,’” O’Neal said. “She played “America the Beautiful,” and I look at her, and she’s crying. I asked, ‘Are you okay?’ and she said, ‘I just became an American citizen.’”

On another occasion, a construction worker kept passing through the second-floor hallway, and O’Neal eventually convinced him to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. It was the first time he had touched an instrument, and he said, ‘Wow, I can’t believe I played a song.’

Since the beginning of her bell-ringing career, there have been many touching moments like these that O’Neal tries to record in a journal, much like how she documented her year abroad in Nepal. Those kinds of interactions are what make the job interesting and fulfilling for O’Neal. As she continues to work, O’Neal finds herself in a comforting routine of offering the bells to passersby on Mondays and Wednesdays at noon. For O’Neal, managing the bells above Kerrytown is a great expression of maturity and continuity.

“Somehow I used to forget what day of the week it was, and now I am here [on time],” O’Neal said. “That’s part of being a mom, being more responsible.”

During one of her many trips to Nepal, O’Neal stopped at the same tea house where she met Pemba. Pemba’s uncle, Nuru, placed a tiny puppy in O’Neal’s lap. In rural Nepal, these dogs are disliked, and this particular puppy had been found with barbed wire around its neck near the airport in Lukla. Nuru insisted that O’Neal take the dog back to America, and she adamantly declined the proposition. The dog was so cute that O’Neal couldn’t resist petting him, even though he ended up peeing on the tea house floor.

“I seem to be known for [taking animals home with me],” O’Neal said. “I brought a cat home from Hungary, and she had died two years before. It was a big hole in my heart.”

Three days later, while checking out of the hotel, the dog found O’Neal again, and her fellow travelers encouraged her to take the dog back with them. O’Neal was conflicted, but decided that she couldn’t leave the puppy in the clogged streets of Kathmandu. Before leaving, she emailed her future husband, Keith, to let him know she was bringing the dog home.

“Keith is so stable and smart, and I thought for sure he would say, ‘Don’t do that, that’s crazy,’ but his line was, ‘I can’t wait to meet him.’” O’Neal said.

O’Neal took five flights to bring her dog home, and still, the absurdity didn’t end. The dog ended up having severe separation anxiety and chewed up doors, windowsills and seatbelts in cars. Eventually, O’Neal got advice to get a second dog to quell her first dog’s anxiety, and it worked like a charm. Before that, O’Neal was forced to stay home and concentrate, which was a very different life from what she was used to.

“My theory about being a mom is that you cannot think of yourself first like I did for so many years,” O’Neal said. “You suddenly have huge responsibilities.”

Throughout O’Neal’s journey of both becoming a mother and having many other jobs, opportunities and adventures, she has experienced a variety of cultures and languages and has created many of her own traditions. From taking a year abroad in the country she came to adore, to spending over a decade trying to get back, she has been helping people create life-changing moments under the Bells of Kerrytown. O’Neal’s life has been a whirlwind of experiences and challenges that have all led her to where she is now.

“Some people know what they want to do when they grow up,” O’Neal said. “But I went from opportunity to opportunity, and

that [has] led me on this crazy journey.”