The Holidays Are Over

The September holiday month quickly passed and students and staff packed up the summer school and travelled over the Himalaya to Pokhara to begin their winter term.

Grateful Thanks!

It’s with grateful thanks to staff, monks and boys from the monastic school for all their efforts in helping to get winter school ready and to welcome everyone back to Pokhara for the winter. 

There was a lot of cleaning, weeding and clearing of the undergrowth to do – wonderful to have it done before our girls arrived back. 

Thank-you so much everyone!  What a wonderful effort!. 

New Teaching Arrangements

After their month long vacation, everyone has returned to school where classes began just 10 days ago.

Now the combined schools have been awarded a licence for Grade 10  (massive achievement for a school like ours), most classes are now becoming Co-ed as there are neither enough girls nor boys to complete the Education Ministry’s criteria on class sizes in both schools (ie a minimum of 7 students in each class for every licenced year).

All girls will continue to reside at the hillside school and the boys at the lakeside monastic (boys) school. 

Children for the Kindergarten and classes 1 and 2 will have their education in the same hillside classrooms and the older children in classes 3 to 10, will be taught in the newly constructed classrooms at the monastic schools. 

After walking down the hillside, the children will travel between the schools in a wonderful new bus donated by the Indian Ambassador to Nepal. 

Please Help Us Pay Our Teachers’ A Fair Wage

The past couple of years has been hard for everyone and fundraising has not escaped the hardships caused by the global pandemic.  We’re running a fundraiser to help us build funds to give our teachers a modest salary increase – their first for many years.

Raising the money to build the school was a challenge but having done so, now we are committed to support the ongoing running costs of the school, which receives no government funding.  Of course, this includes the cost of teacher’s salaries.  Our qualified teachers are salaried and receive a fair wage, which has resulted in the school being recognised for its high level of academic achievement.

Our teachers must be at least bilingual, and some speak 3 languages Tibetan, Nepali and English.  All our teachers live-in at the school 6 months of the year in Upper Mustang and during the winter 6 months in Pokhara  in the foothills of the Himalayas.  It’s not an easy career as apart from their teaching schedules our teachers undertake welfare responsibilities for our girls too and take a duty roster to be on call at nights and holidays.

Please help us if you can to raise the shortfall we have in our budget this year.  £1200 will support the salary of a full time, resident teacher for a year and we need to raise at least another £4500 this year to have enough funds to support all our teachers through 2023 and give them a small salary increase. 

Any surplus raised above this will be used to help fund our teacher training programme next year. 

I’ve set up a Fundraiser campaign on Fundrazr here.  Any amount you can offer, however modest will help us enormously.

Thank-You!  Please spread the word to family and friends if you can.

Or, of course, via PayPal or Bank Transfer on our Website Donation Page