In previous posts I have focused on reconstruction of schools – my reason for coming to Gorkha. In this post I want to focus on houses: what they were like before the earthquake, how they fared as a result of the quake and how new houses are being built (or not). The traditional house in the middle hills of Nepal was built completely of native … Continue reading Houses Before and After the Earthquake

Lest you think that I am actually doing real physical work here, think again. No shoveling sand, moving rock, pounding nails. I am getting physical, however, walking up and down some pretty steep ridges many days. And riding on lots of buses that I would really prefer not to be on. OK then, so what is my job here? I would describe it as “general … Continue reading What’s Tim Actually Doing in Nepal?

A fter the earthquake struck last April, with the epicenter in western Gorkha District, most of the schools in the district collapsed. Most were constructed with walls of stone and mud mortar, and many had exceptionally heavy slate roofs. To keep public school education alive these buildings were replaced with hastily constructed Temporary Learning Centers (TLs), the subject of an earlier post. Gorkha continues to … Continue reading New Schools for the Gorkha Earthquake Zone

Back in the day, when I first got to Nepal in the late 1960s, there were, for all practical purposes, no roads in the hills of Nepal other than those that linked Kathmandu to India to the south and Tibet to the north. All movement was by foot, and all goods moved on people’s backs. Now, from what I see in Gorkha District, there are … Continue reading Roads in Gorkha

After the earthquakes that hit Gorkha and other parts of Nepal last April and May, the first and most compelling need was to provide emergency assistance – meaning drinking water, food, medicine and shelter against the upcoming monsoon. Shortly after this response it became evident that the destruction of so many schools threatened to create a lost generation of students whose education was cut short … Continue reading TLC

Gorkha is one of Nepal’s more than 70 districts. If you went out to the big Kolanki bus park, where the Ring Road around Kathmandu meets the road to Pokhara, you could catch a bus heading west, toward Pokhara. This road is really the only east-west road through the middle hills of Nepal, for the simple reason that all the big ridges and the river … Continue reading Where in the World?

Before committing to this trip, I had a bunch of phone and Skype calls with Don Messerschmidt, who is on the Gorkha Foundation Advisory Board, and with Foundation Chair Bijaya (BJ) Devkota. But it wasn’t until I took a train trip from Vermont to Washington DC and met BJ, that it got real for me. We were supposed to hook up somewhere, but the Great … Continue reading Gorkha Foundation