Nepal Education Fund

The below report is part of #ThankstoEducation, an ongoing campaign celebrating 10 million children benefited by Room to Read's work. This story was written by Raj Kumar Gajurel, a teacher in a Room to Read Literacy Program School in Nepal. 

Room to Read will have a full Nepal Education Fund report ready in the next month, which we look forward to sharing with the GlobalGiving community at that time. 

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As the land trembled beneath my feet, people started running. In a few seconds the house in front of me collapsed, releasing a plume of smoke in the air. I thought the building I was standing near would bury me. I cannot express how horrifying this was.

When the ground stopped shaking, the streets filled with chaos. Some of us tried to get home to see our families. Others of us ran into the open spaces, away from anything still standing.

It was a Saturday when the earthquake struck Nepal. When I got home, I found my house, which I had grown up in, flattened to the ground. Thankfully, my family was not hurt. We went through the ruins of our house to salvage anything we could—ornaments, important documents, and tin sheets that we could reuse.

All the while I thought about my school, fearing it too was destroyed.

I hurried through the chaotic streets to see the school where I had spent so many years of my life, first as a student, then as a teacher and now as a librarian. I braced myself for the worst.

All my efforts to prepare myself were useless. My beloved school, which I had left intact yesterday, was gone. In its place was a pile of dust-covered desks and rocks. The blackboard where I had written yesterday’s lecture had a gaping hole down the middle, as if it had opened up and swallowed the lesson. As I wandered through the rubble I was overcome by a thousand questions: How will we overcome this? What will happen to our students and their futures?

To my surprise and utter joy, our library was still intact. My community had built it just last year with Room to Read’s support. They had used an earthquake-resistant design and I was now witnessing the profound difference this makes: the library was practically the only building left standing.

I thought back to when we inaugurated the library. It was one of the happiest moments at our school and our entire community had come together to celebrate. I was overjoyed to see the change in my students—not only were they excited to spend time in the bright room filled with colorful books, but the library was developing in them the habit of reading. Parents were also drawn to the library where they would check out books and read the newspapers.

Now we all came together again—this time to clear the rubble that was once our school. When we started our first school session a month later, following the government’s announcement, many students came. We spent the first few weeks under the open sky doing fun activities—singing, dancing and storytelling to assuage our students’ fears of the aftershocks.

With the support of the District Education Office and help from the community, we soon built a temporary learning center out of tin sheets. This gave our students a place to study and reconnect with the school. The additional books Room to Read distributed to all the affected schools were a big help too, since many of my students had lost theirs in the earthquake.

Now that several months have passed, I can say that we have seen hard times and we have overcome them. Room to Read has been instrumental in this, visiting us regularly to provide support and counseling. We had to stop our literacy instruction due to a lack of classrooms, but we are hopeful that we will be able to resume it once we get the support we need to rebuild our school.

We have lost many things but not our dreams. Thanks to education, the earthquake took away our school but not our resolve.

Thank you so much to the GlobalGiving network for supporting Room to Read's efforts in Nepal. In this report, we are pleased to share with you a story from the field. In mid-July, Room to Read Co-Founder John Wood visited Nepal for the first time since the two earthquakes damaged and destoryed thousands of classrooms. Below is a blog post that John wrote for the South China Morning Post as part of a "Hong Kong Helps Nepal Series." This post details what John Wood witnessed on his first day in Nepal after the earthquakes.

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My first full day in Nepal began with a briefing from the Room to Read Nepal team. Over an early breakfast I listened to our plans for the day: “We’re going to visit students in our girls' education programme.  At the school we are visiting, we have 39 girls enrolled in our programme and support them to complete secondary school. Thirty-six of these young women had their houses destroyed in the recent earthquakes.”

This did not sound like a harbinger of a happy day. I debated what a visiting guest should say to the young women who had experienced and survived such trauma. 

Shree Bajrayoginee Secondary School lies in the dusty district of Sankhu, on the distant outskirts of the Kathmandu Valley. As we made the long drive, our team shared with me that the 36 girls whose homes had been destroyed were living in the tent camps that I was now viewing through the car window. Despite this challenge, every one of these girls still shows up for school every day, and has been doing so since the day schools reopened following the twin earthquakes that struck the country this spring.

How, I asked, was this possible? Reema, the director of our girls’ education programme, explained that her team of “social mobilisers” (our term for employed mentors who act as advocates for the girls in the programme) had been supporting these girls from day one - paying daily visits to the tent camps to offer trauma counselling to the girls and their families, while also encouraging them to prepare to return to school. “We want the girls to look forward rather than backward,” said Reema. This was not an easy task for many families, and in many cases it took a series of long conversations. 

Fortunately, the girls on our programme are extremely motivated. Some had even approached the workers who were in charge of the earthquake clean-up, asking them, “Can you find my books in the rubble? Can you locate my school uniform?” Our local team was amazed that the girls never spoke about the loss of their houses, but rather focused their fear on not being able to return to school.

The young women in our programme, ranging from grades eight to 11, gave us a warm greeting with bright smiles upon our arrival. They were dressed in the crisp new school uniforms our team had provided for them. Several girls had recently scored high marks on their national exam, five with high distinction, and were eager to share this news. We talked about the level of education their parents had enjoyed, and learned that not a single one of them had a mother who had finished secondary school. These girls will be part of a new generation of educated Nepali women who will likely one day be mothers and pass on that value of education and literacy to their future children.

One young woman had her head wrapped in a burgundy scarf, but not for religious reasons. She had suffered a head injury when she was trapped in the rubble of her family’s collapsed home for over six hours. Our staff had helped her get to a hospital and paid for her medical and surgical expenses. Despite this physical and emotional trauma, this girl did not want to miss a day of school and was there the day the doors reopened. A Room to Read staff member told me: “She did not wish to think of herself as a victim.” And I could tell that immediately when watching her with her peers - she did not sit on the classroom periphery but  made sure she was right in the middle, surrounded by her friends.

As each girl told me her story, there was little focus on the recent destruction. They instead talked about their dreams - to attend university, to study abroad, to be a nurse. Room to Read’s girls’ education programme places a larger emphasis on life skills education - critical skills girls need in addition to the academics so they are in a better position to navigate life’s challenges and make their own life choices, both personally and professionally.  I was witnessing first-hand how our life skills education component was working as these girls faced the normal challenges of adolescence combined with the challenges of a natural disaster.

When one told me that me that she wanted to be an engineer, I asked, “Is it intimidating to you that most engineers are men?” She replied with a shy smile and a gleam in her eyes, “Yes, that is true, and it is all the more reason I want to prove that girls can do it too.”

I returned to my hotel room optimistic and full of energy, in contrast to the morning's hesitation and apprehension. The young women from the Shree Bajrayoginee Secondary School reminded me of the resilience of the Nepalese people, and their unwavering belief in the power of education to help the nation move forward.

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You can read the full series here and follow John Wood on Twitter here.