And with the 10th Wishner5 school, the adventure began! After weeks of blue skies and sunshine the weather took a turn for the worse, and as we filled our bellies with daal bhat after handing over school #9, the heavens opened. Not necessarily a problem if the school you are wanting to get to is accessed by a black-topped road, but when its at the end of a 15 km dirt track things start getting a little interesting.
We left our lovely comfortable car and driver at the restaurant to rest and we all pilled into the jeep our local partner Creative Concern Society had organized. Already the driver was shaking his head as the rain got progressively heavier, but we are an adventurous crew and assumed he was being overly pessimistic. How wrong we were! As the further we got into the middle of rural Sindhuli the worse the track got, until after much slipping and sliding the jeep finally ground to a halt on a small steep hill, unable to get up it despite all our efforts to help it. Thankfully it was able to reverse back to point where it could then cross the river and wait for us on a marginally better section of track.
We in the meantime gathered our belongings together and started walking with just one borrowed umbrella between the five of us. All was not lost however, as four large banana leaves later we all had some kind of shelter from the rain to continue our journey with. 20 minutes and an awful lot of rain and mud later we heard a shout from head of ‘Sir aayo’ or ‘Sir has arrived’ and we were met by a very smiley and warm welcome, as given the lateness of our arrival and the lack of phone reception so we hadn’t been able to tell them we were on our way, the school had begun to assume we wouldn’t be coming.
Giving up however was never an option, especially for this 10th school, as it is dedicated to a very special person, Mark Vincent who sadly passed away recently. Mark was a close friend and colleague of Dr. Jerry Wishner, the head of the Wishner5, and was there from the beginning when Beyond the Epicenter was just a dream.
Instead of the usual ceremony outside the new building, we all bundled out of the rain into what will become the new Early Childhood Development classroom, come the new academic year in late April. In the other classroom of this two room building Class 1 were having fun singing and shouting out answers to questions for while goofing around for the camera.
A short and sweet ceremony was held and the welcome and thanks we received from the teachers, parents and School Management Committee was second to none. Warmth and joy just oozed from them as they sat on the newly carpeted floor (no room for chairs!) as they expressed their thanks for the support. Given its location, the ethnic make-up of the locals and the fact that the head teacher is not invested in the school’s best interests (he was conspicuous by his absence), having a new building built for them and the opportunity for the communities littlest children to start school from the spring, is a huge.
Once the formalities had come to an end, we were invited for tea at one of the local’s houses before heading off on foot through yet more mud and a river to find our jeep.
Finally back on the main road, we met up with our own driver, washed as much mud off as we could and started the long journey home. Thankfully our driver Sudip was well rested, as the return journey was pretty epic in its own right. We left the mud behind, but swapped it for thick patchy fog – not much fun on a dark, rainy road full of switchback bends and with death drops on one side and large gnarly storm drains on the other. At one point both Sudip and Amrit were hanging out of their respective windows so they could at least see the tarmac. 19½ hours since our early morning departure, we finally rolled back into Kathmandu tired but happy and we all fell into our respective beds bang on midnight.
A Himalayan thank you to everyone involved with this project. To Hari Bhusal who coordinated the project on our behalf. Navaraj Pahadi and Ramita Manandhar of Collective Concern Society Nepal, our local partner in Sindhuli, without whom these rebuild projects would be nigh on impossible. The School Management Committee members, teachers, parents and especially master builder Raju Magar who all pulled together in support of the project and to help get it finished in double quick time. But most of all we wish to thank the Wishner Family, collectively known as the Wishner5, Mark Vincent and DoTERRA Healing Hands Foundation, who match funded dollar for dollar a fundraiser that Alli Wishner organized last year.
20 new classrooms at 10 different schools, impacting over 2000 children and in excess of 100 teachers over the last four years is a truly amazing legacy, one that will continue to touch the lives of many children and teachers for years to come.