Shree Gumba Himali Primary School, Bihi

The school was totally destroyed during the 2015 earthquake affecting the school’s surrounding lands. I worked with the community to re-locate and re-build the school. Finding a good piece of land to re-build school in the Himalayan valley is an insurmountable task. We were lucky to find and negotiate the previous health post site (and the health post was relocated closer to the village) to re-build the school. The fertile lands of the villagers are crucial to produce corn, wheat, millet that is the only subsistence farming people depend upon. So I rejected the idea of encroaching in agricultural fields. The site for the school was open pasture dotted by Himalayan blue pine trees. The approval of school design was another challenge due to the lack of reference designs available at the Ministry of Education, Building Department. The strategy to engage locals in collecting building materials such as stones and woods while following up for the building permit in Kathmandu worked to solve the issue at each side. School was designed in wood and timber, later I had to take out the stone masonry and adopt only the wood roofed by the CGI sheets. The building design approval took a year and another year to re-build the school in the village.