Meridian native Anna Gill left home soon after high school to pursue a career in acting and music. Now, at 31, she’s leaving home again for very different reasons.

    Anna is headed to Nepal, an ancient but poor country in the Himalayas, where she will spend nine months teaching art and music to orphaned children as well as working with the Women’s Empowerment Project, which teaches Nepalese women to become independent using skills like craft-making.

    After 10 years of striving for success in the entertainment industry, Anna said she had an epiphany that helped her redefine what success in life really is.

    “(I realized) my life is not defined by earthly success,” she said. “To me, my purpose in life was to discover who I was in connection with the creator, with God … I’m going to go love people who have no love.”

     Anna said it’s important to her that people know she’s not going to Nepal just to “enlighten” the people there to her American way of life. She expects to gain at least as much from the people she works with as they do from her.

    “It’s a mutual exchange,” she said. “They will probably change my life more than I could ever change theirs.”

    Anna, who has lived in Asheville, N.C., Norfolk, Va., New York, and Nashville, Tenn. since first leaving Meridian, is a lover of self-expression. She paints, sings, acts, writes songs, cooks, and does just about anything else she can that’s creative, she said. She’s acted in independent films, music videos, and commercials, and has worked with prominent songwriters.

    In her art and music classes, Anna said she hopes to help her students learn not only self-expression, but self-worth.

    “A lot of the children I’ll be working with are orphans . . . They’re in a society where they’re considered as people who do not have much worth . . . I want to put them in a situation where they can be praised and have confidence about themselves.” she said. “They can come to art class, where they can be their own boss — where’s there’s no right and there’s no wrong.”