We help our students have roots in Nepal, and a Global outlook and skills as wings for success.
School trip to Darjeeling: our top-class students (except one) had never been further than 10 miles from home. With a special donation for the purpose, we took 14 school-leavers (and three teachers) across the nearby border to India for four nights.
For the first time, the fourteen-year-olds visited another country (India), saw a large city, a train, a museum, a rock garden, the inside of a hotel, gigantic temples, and a zoo. We gave them cash for new clothes, and they felt super cool as they flew through the sky in a cable car, rode on a horse, ate new food and survived being away from their family.
Our schools just keep on growing. We have over 250 children in our schools.
And we don’t have enough desks. Every April, as we start a new school year, we need more desks and to replace some worn-out ones. Class 7 has 3 more pupils, classes 4,5 and 6 have 5 more. Lower down, some desks have been mended just once too often. Each desk or desk/bench costs £35. We would dearly love some to be donated. We have been given some as birthday presents to one of our Mentors who said, ‘I have asked for a desk for my birthday from my friends, and the same from the children, and from my husband. Anything for the school is a genuine pleasure.’ Thank you.
Look carefully and you will see two of our children walking home from school. I wonder how different this is from your children’s daily journeys. Our children know they live in a beautiful place but yearn to understand city life and wonder what it feels like to swim in the sea and if it is terrifying travelling on planes or trains.
Buildings, Resources and Teachers
We will be building again. Our students currently finish after Class 8, when they are about 14 years old. They take the public ‘Basic Leavers’ Exam’, but the meaningful exams happen aged 16 with the ‘School Leavers Certificate’ – equivalent to GCSEs in the UK…so we are building 2 more classrooms.
We have bought land near the Montessori School, which will see it grow from Nursery (ages 3 to 4), Lower Kindergarten and Upper Kindergarten to include Classes 1 and 2. This will free-up 2 classrooms in the Yellow School for the new Classes 9 and 10. We will start building after the monsoon in about October. Until we get a licence to extend teaching to these new classes (which may not be fast), we want to support our school-leavers to continue their quality education. There are no ideal solutions, but one school has great teachers: our Mentors of these students are supporting them to attend Kangchenjunga School in Taplejung, as shown above. This is extremely generous of them as the school-fees are only part of the bursaries required: also, books, uniform, standard extra tuition before school and, most of all, board and lodging. All 14 students have been offered bursaries; they can continue to challenge each other to ‘work smart’. We shall ensure they continue to have access to computers.
Legacies have played an important part in enabling us to improve the children’s education. One of our mentors donated money left to her which has enabled every child in a class to take up the guitar. We believe that music expands communication and imagination, it boosts IQ and much, much more. We can help you write your Will in such a way that you could benefit these children; just ask. Some of this special legacy is intended for the children whom she and her husband sponsor. We are looking after this money so that the children will be able to use it later for their further education. Again, if you would like to set up a small fund for a child, please talk to us.
It is hard to describe how different these pictures are from almost any you could take in other schools in Nepal.
Above you can see the headsets hung up in the computer room. Now students can join zoom lessons from the UK, listen to music and play chess. Here, these children are being given their new school textbooks by Pauline and Laurie Bennett from New Zealand, who have donated these, and uniforms, for many years. We still need more computers for independent study and for our students now at Kangchenjunga School (which does not have computers).
We are welcoming several new teachers to the schools.
This is to improve the quality of education and prepare ourselves for teaching Classes 9 and 10. The feedback about our students, as they mix into their new class at Kangchenjunga School, is that they range between exceptional to very good….in all except Nepali. In our push for better English, we have neglected their National (often their second) language! We will do better next year.
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