Location Bakhang village, north Nepal
Type Emergency and Education
Amount £50,000
Location and background
Bakhang is a remote village in Nepal near the border with Tibet. It is an eight hour drive and a five hour walk from Kathmandu. The village is home to 60 families of ethnic Tibetans – including 85 school-aged children. Since 2009 Tibet Relief Fund has been paying the salary of a Tibetan teacher at the village school. This ensures the children of Bakhang can complete their primary schooling without fear of losing their Tibetan language skills.
With very few opportunities for education in the area, it is very important the local children have a school to go to. With a good basic education, they can go for further schooling in the cities and get the tools they need for a brighter future.
Project
In 2015, two massive earthquakes in Nepal destroyed the school in Bakhang village. Since then, the children have been studying in make-shift tent classrooms. These are unsafe and very cold. Parents do not feel confident about sending their children to school like this. Since the earthquakes hit, attendance at the school has dropped from 85 to 45.
With your support, we have raised enough money to rebuild the school.
We are working on re-building the school with an NGO, based in Kathmandu, called Build Up Nepal. They specialise in training local people to build their own houses and community spaces using something called ‘compressed earth technology’ – a low cost, sustainable and earthquake resistant way of building.
The villagers are taught how to mix the local soil with cement and sand and how to use a compression machine to turn this mixture into bricks! Once the bricks have dried in the sun, they are ready to be made in to buildings. The bricks are interlocking so they are very simple to use – just like giant Lego bricks! The buildings are strengthened using metal bars and pillars – making the finished product highly earthquake resistant.
Once the building is complete and the roof is on, the village will be left with the brick making machine and the skills to use it. This means they can repair and construct their own buildings without having to rely on outside help in the future. It also means they can earn some much needed extra money by making bricks and selling them to neighbouring villages!
Training for the villagers is already underway and construction will be begin shortly. If all goes well, the new school will be finished before the monsoons come again in June, 2017. The locals in Bakhang are all behind the project and can’t wait to see the finished school and get their children back to classes safely once again.