Daily Dispatches [CLICK FOR INDEX] Gordon Janow Monastic Boarding School
Sat, April 17, 1999 — Kathmandu, Nepal
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Hi, it's Gordon from Alpine Ascents, and we're getting ready to leave Kathmandu. Sorry we haven't had any communication for a few days. It's really been a whirlwind of activities.

Preparing food When we left Lukla, we had a huge dancing, Sherpa-style party with a lot of eating, a little drinking, and mostly dancing, singing songs into the night. It's a time where over 25 of the Sherpa staff who have helped us cooking, carrying loads, working with the yaks, carrying bags, and basically guiding us up to the Base Camp of Mt. Everest. It's just a time when we can all kind of kick back, talk a little, and spend time with each other on sort of equal footing. It's a really nice thing and usually lasts a long time. Everybody kind of breaks down, tells stories and things like that.

So that was quite enjoyable—lasted into the night, and we were generally hustling out to catch a flight from Lukla, which is kind of its own style of mayhem. There are flights coming in and out. We're always trying to get people on and back and forth; so it's not organized. We've been doing this so long we kind of have a way to get people in and out. We finally got back to Kathmandu.

Tengboche Monastery Earlier, during the trek, we had bought some paintings from a famous monk in a monastery. One of the rules was: if we buy the paintings, we have to take two monks back—now they are small boys who had never been to Kathmandu— and deliver them to a monastery. So we spent a lot of yesterday taking the boys, getting them to Kathmandu—it's their first time on a flight, first time out of their remote village in the Khumbu, and deliver them to a monastery about an hour from here. So it was pretty interesting to watch these boys leave their home for the first time and enter a sort of monastic boarding school. So that was quite interesting and we were happy to play a part in that.

Children in the Khumbu Lastly, Alpine Ascents and some others have begun a scholastic fund to help people who live in the Khumbu, mostly the Sherpa boys and some girls, go to school in Kathmandu, where the schools are better. So we selected our first students and we began setting up an education fund. We'll be paying for their private school here. We're trying to get about five to seven boys a year. It's about $1,000 each for them to go to a year of schooling.

So it'll start to educate people in the Khumbu who hopefully will go on to elementary school, junior high, high school, and college here, then be able to return to the Khumbu. As it's rapidly changing, they'll have perhaps a more educated group of people there. And when I say educated, I mean more in the sciences, electronics, and such. As the Khumbu changes, they'll probably be using more engineers and things like that. So hopefully some of you may be able to participate in that, but it's something we've been wanting to do for awhile, and we're all very excited to see it come to fruition.

So we'll be heading out to the airport pretty soon. Everybody here is leaving in good health. A few of us here are remaining a couple of extra days to take care of some other nonsense and such, but we'll be reporting again in the near future. Thanks very much.

Gordon Janow, Trek Leader
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