Community Leader and School Founding Donor Passes Away
Spring has brought Helambu the gift of education thanks largely to the generosity and leadership of the woman pictured to the left. Referred to affectionately as “Evee”, Pasang Lamani Sherpa, charity president Dorjee Sherpa’s aunt, was the donor of the lands upon which now stand Gangkharka’s first boarding school. She passed away this week from an unknown fever.
She was however, able to live long enough to see the school completed and the students and teachers arrive to begin classes. The school will be her legacy for as long as it stands, as will the good its students will do for their country years after they graduate.
She will be missed by her family and neighbors in Helambu, as well as the volunteers who were lucky enough to share tea with her.
The next few months will see great advancement and milestones in development for Helambu.
Construction will soon begin on a micro-hydroelectric system th
at will provide power to the boarding school, the village of Gangkharka, and other nearby areas.
This will be a consistent
and environmentally-friendly source of power that will allow for multi-media lessons at the school.
The importance of this cannot be understated. In this remote area, where there are not even roads, the people of these communities will have regular access to electricity, as opposed to Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital city, which now enjoys as little as four hours of electricity everyday.
School begun!
Following the completion of a construction process that began in September, the first wave of students in Gangkharka’s new board ing school arrived
in the village from Kathmandu.
The students were thrilled to return to their home region after living and learning at a private school in Kathmandu. Now closer to culture and family, they will have access to a quality education that will simultaneously encourage the preservation of traditional practices and lay the foundation for the skills they will need to keep their villages pristine and prosperous for generations to come. For now, there are 55 children enrolled at the school with another 35 to follow soon.
Their ages range from as young
as 4 to 11.
Construction of the school begins.
From a dream that started many years ago the construction of the school and boarding facility f inally started
in September 2008.
For the next six months there will be over thirty labourers working away to complete the building work, with an estimated completion date of Spring 2009.
Without Western luxuries such as electrify or petrol driven machines, the school will be built completely by hand.
A permanent squad of twelve labourers will rema in on site with many others
involved in portering the building materials from the valleys below.
