High Mount School (or Mount High School)
I need to get my story straight here. Sometimes I think the while school is funded by the Nepal Education Fund, other times I think there are some students who are not sponsored. Information from conversations with Mann, (the NEF representative), the Principal and the students differ, but that just might be how I hear things, rather than what they actually say.
Anyway, it is called a 'boarding school' to signify private education as different from a government school. No students actually board there.
Because it is festival time, yesterday there were only 4 Class 10 students there, and while Ed, Mann and the Principal visited sponsored families, I sat in on a lesson. The teacher had a very loud voice. It did echo across the empty yard. Today was revision on the lenses in a compound microscope and a telescope. We had a short discussion about how this might have been taught in "my country" and the teacher explained to the students that other countries have "practical classes". But today we had a white board, a diagram and an explanation.
Right now I am thinking again about taking technology (and electricity ) for granted. Even a colour diagram of a telescope might have made a huge difference. Let alone a computer screen with annotations.
The Principal's wife, who regularly teaches in a government school, was sweeping and cleaning up wood shavings. They had had some new furniture made in the break time. We swept, then walked out the back of the school to see the Seti River. The school is on a sheer cliff face (no fence). 60m below, on the river flood plain there are shanties, and many of the students live there. These families shovel stones and rocks from the river bed, and carry them up for building materials. In the rainy season, the families might be up to their necks in water, still shovelling. Such determination just to get enough to eat. On road edges, you can see people shovelling piles of rocks against what almost looks like a wire bed frame. This sorts rocks into sizes, eventually resulting in a fine cement like dust.
On the way back by taxi, we sat on a steer corner waiting for ...... a cow to move enough for traffic to pass. I watched road works. Ancient men and woman squatted on the road, tapping and hammering away at the rocks, filling in holes with smaller rocks. Another person swept with the bunch of twigs. Across to one side, there were three 44 gallon drums, black and tarry, one suspended over a wood fire. Another man was stirring it. He tipped it over into a bucket arrangement, and another man "watered" the road surface with the tarry liquid. I guess it's sort of an Macadam road, with layers of rocks, then a sort of bitumen surface.
When Ed came back from visiting families he had several stories to tell. Often the families are one or more women managing 2, 3 or 4 children, sometimes biologically related but also some children have been taken in after one or more parent has disappeared, died or is just not coping with every day . I realise more and more how important a basic education is. In Kathmandu I saw street kids who were glue sniffers. They looked to be 6-8 years old. But who can tell. So these ones here in extended families, still living on the borderline of starvation are better off than some others. If a mother has a illness, things become very, very difficult. The NEF has some funds for an emergency like that, but again that is only because a sponsor somewhere has kicked in. So I know that one boy recently had a haemorrhoid operation, another mother needed help with cancer, and just now another child was treated for a urinary track infection. But again, only because someone, somewhere, found the money.
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