|
We arrived in Hangdaway on Saturday the 13th September after five days of travelling; one underground train, two planes, three busses and a two hour walk. It really is that remote! I was excited to see the developments that had been made. The last time I was here was in May when Q Learning signed a contract with the committee agreeing to pay for the building work and two years of tuition. Standing in the clearing where the school will be and looking around, I thought that if I were a student here I would spend all my time distracted, staring out at the incredible view. The wispy white clouds creep over the green mountains thick with trees and a few white houses surrounded by paddie fields, while below a river winds its way through the canyon descending so quickly you can see the rapids even from here, and above the white tops of the Kanchenjunga range are visible in the distance. However, the children here have been used to the peaceful beauty of the Himalayas since birth and should hopefully be better able to concentrate than I was.
So far all the land has been cleared and the foundations are in place. The school is built into the mountain side which makes this a considerable job as all the work is done by hand. Luckily for us the ground was filled with large stones which could be used for the foundations and the supporting wall. Good news as otherwise they would have had to be brought in from elsewhere carried by workers along narrow paths that are sometimes impassable due to the many landslides that occur each year.
Saturday is the Holy day of the week so when we arrived there were only four men working, but for the rest of the week there are normally about twelve. The school will have ten classrooms in total, five on the ground floor and five above them, each with thirty students measuring six meters by five meters. While we were there all the remaining raw materials arrived, so the speed of the work should now increase dramatically after the Dashain festival which starts on the 24th and lasts for ten days, where no one is expected to be working. Assuming that everything runs to plan the completion of the building work is scheduled for the middle of December.
The classrooms will have wooden doors, windows and electric light as well as a number of computers. So the first thing to do was work out how we could extend the local hydro scheme the village has to generate enough electricity for our school. Next we met with the committee who were all extremely happy with the work that has been done so far, which was greatly encouraging. The committee is running well (a number of the nine members are teachers from a private school that exists in the area) and we discussed proposals for formalizing the constitution of the school. We agreed with them the following major points; the school should be for orphans, children of a lower caste and those not able to pay for education while there should be an equal amount of male and female students. Further we agreed that the school should accept only children from Hangdaway region with the exception of ten particularly deserving children from outside, provided places for them to stay with people in the village could be found.
We believed that the committee should be formed of people who were a true representation of the type of students who would be coming to the school. With this in mind we invited four new people onto the committee so that there would be a greater balance of male and female members and of different castes. I am happy to report that, while there is still lots to do, everything in Hangdaway is progressing very positively and after our visit we have a much better understanding of the costs and supplies needed to get the school ready for the start of the academic year in April.
On the last day we were at the village we met a small boy who had been found fifteen days previously in the capital of the region Taplejung, where we had got off the final bus. He had been abandoned by his parents and was in a bad state; however, a local man who already had five children, agreed to look after him and treat him like his own child. The villagers estimated he was about two and a half years old; his name is unknown. It is precisely for children like this that we are building the Big Hills Q Learning School, so that they can have the opportunity, for the first time in this area, to get free education. If you are interested in supporting the project please contact Q Learning, or make a donation through Just Giving via the link below
Click here to see photos
Edward Gosling
//www.justgiving.com/qlearning/
|
