A Busy Summer and Now Time for Warm Clothes

It’s been a busy time during the summer school term in Upper Mustang with 2 big community-wide events and a lot of construction activity.

It’s been a while since the last newsletter and we have so much to share!

In July the school was greatly honoured by a visit of  HH the 42nd Sakya Trinzin, who stayed in school and  gave teachings to over 6,000 people from Mustang and neighbouring regions.  Attendees could also receive a free medical check up at the social project medical camp provided for the community at the event.

These community teachings are a great benefit for people in the Buddhist community and shows the need to have facilities to host such events as well as to give a teaching and meeting hall for the ever growing school.

Other construction projects included the new toilet block, which was desperately needed now that we have over 50 girls, 9 teachers and 2 support staff.  Grateful thanks to everyone who so generously helped us achieve this project..  And we can guess how grateful the girls may be having previously been managing with just 2 toilets for 50 girls and staff!

Our dear friends in Altevette Onlus (Italy) have done a magnificent job of raising money to build the multi-functional teaching hall, which will be completed by summer of next year (we hope).

And following the unprecedented flood of last summer there’s been a really robust project to build flood defences and rebuild the river bank.  Generous donors from Italy enabled this successful construction, which gives great reassurance to the girls and staff alike.

Summer term is over and our girls are returning now to winter school in Pokhara after the holidays – a journey made difficult for some students by recent heavy rainfall and mudslides.

We have just returned from a visit to the winter school, where there has also been construction over the summer.  A second row of classrooms has been built and will soon be formally opened late this month.

Apart from enjoying time with our dear students and staff, our mission was to take warm winter clothes before the onset of cold winter weather.

We were overwhelmed by our generous supporters here in the Uk – especially:

• the girls at PRINCESS HELENA COLLEGE in Herts, the HENLEY PARENTS GROUP in Oxfordshire,
• the girls from BEECH HANGER HOUSE from Caterham School in Surrey and
• parents from BROADMAYNE FIRST SCHOOL in Dorset who collected winter hats and scarves, leggings, socks and winter woollies, and 
• dear 9 year old JUDHYTHA who generously and graciously sent a gift to our girls too.

Our girls were really excited to hear that students from the UK were interested in supporting them and loved to hear about the schools involved.   The younger girls were delighted to see Judytha’s card showing photos of her home town and her drawing of our students and they readily made cards to send in return.

We made best use of our luggage allowance of 70Kg and still have over 15Kg of warm clothes, socks and undies to take next time.  The bags made it safely to Kathmandu (via Bangkok!) and the school arranged for someone to take them on the final leg to Pokhara on the overnight bus so we could take the small domestic plane more easily!  What a trek!  All went smoothly though and we and the bags all safely arrived at the school and were unpacked ready to share with the girls and staff.

Teachers and staff helped sort clothes by size and distributed to our excited girls.

Everyone was so excited and all the students and some staff will now be gratefully warm when the weather turns cold for winter.

THANK YOU so very much and a deep bow of gratitude to all our gracious and generous sponsors.  Without you we could not fund these essential projects nor support our girls in their education.  We are deeply grateful to you all.

Please stay tuned for news of our next fundraiser, which will be coming soon.  Heartfelt thank-you, thank-you, thank-you to all our kind and generous supporters across the world.

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