Thanks to your support, children in the Everest region of Nepal are back at school in classrooms made safer and stronger than ever before.

The new classrooms at Thame school

In April and May 2015, a series of devastating earthquakes struck Nepal. The earthquakes took the lives of almost 9000 people in Nepal, over 600,000 homes were destroyed, and roads, schools and health facilities were severely damaged.

Your response was amazing. Thanks to you, the Himalayan Trust provided immediate help to communities in the Kathmandu valley and the mountainous Everest region.

We provided emergency shelter, tarpaulins and tents, warm clothing, waterproofs, emergency beds and blankets and built over 30 emergency homes for families whose homes had been destroyed.

Many schools in the Everest region were badly damaged in the earthquakes. The Himalayan Trust immediately built temporary structures or provided tents for temporary classrooms, ensuring children could get back to class and some normality within weeks.

Building 150 safe classrooms at 36 schools

The Himalayan Trust went on to develop the largest infrastructure project we have ever undertaken, building earthquake-strengthened classroom blocks to replace those damaged and destroyed in the earthquakes.

Khumjung: new classrooms to the left of the original schoolroom built by Sir Ed in 1961

Within three years of the first devastating earthquake, we completed 150 earthquake-strengthened classrooms at 36 schools, as well as toilet blocks and a water supply.

Thanks to you, more than 7000 children are now able to study in safe, strong classrooms. And their families and communities will benefit from these facilities for decades to come.

Find out more about the earthquake-strengthened design:

More than bricks and mortar

Tackling many challenges

This school rebuild project has been the largest and most complex infrastructure project ever undertaken by the Himalayan Trust – and it threw up a good many challenges to tackle, including:

• Planning construction work around the monsoon rains and freezing winter temperatures;
• Transporting materials to the remote sites took trucks, tractors, helicopters, mules, yaks and people power – and a good deal of planning;
• A shortage of skilled labour meant plenty of on the job training and good supervision;
• Building without machinery or even wheelbarrows – everything is done by hand. 

Despite the challenges, in less than three years we constructed 150 earthquake-strengthened classrooms at 36 schools.