Back in March, Mahabir Pun, Program Director of the Himanchal Educational Foundation and founder of the Nepal Wireless project, explained how the Nepal Wireless internet signal is bounced and relayed throughout the region from the 3,300m high Khopra Ridge lodge. This key station connects many rural villages on both sides of the Himalayas. More photos [...]
Closing the gap, opening so much more
Today, thousands of University of Nebraska-Kearney Alumni received their bi-yearly magazine, Spring 2011 edition of UNK Today. Lucky for us, we hogged pages 14 – 15 with a beautiful story written by Colleen Fleischer titled, Closing the gap. Upon returning home from Nepal, we found ourselves overwhelmed with stories, interviews, video footage and photos. We [...]
Getting Nangi on the map
A few weeks ago we commissioned Google to add the Himanchal Higher Secondary School as an official location on their maps. The quality and detail of aerial images of the rural areas is pretty stunning as you can see almost every house, building, rock and chicken coop! We’re not assuming to know how in the world Google [...]
Portrait of a Doer: Mahabir Pun
A visionary with his projects, Mahabir explains how one of his newest endeavors, a shitaki mushroom farm, will bring jobs and create a better diet for the community and surrounding areas. “We must show the villagers what they can do, then they will understand what’s possible” Mahabir states. Although some projects are more successful than [...]
From collecting the bark to binding the book
- The Lokta Paper-Making Project in Nangi, Nepal In Nepal, people have been making Lokta paper for centuries. The Papermaking Center (Est. 2005) in Nangi, Nepal is just one of the income generating programs that benefit the prosperity of the Himanchal School as well as the local people of remote village. To date, the Center [...]
Filming for the future, we’re not alone
As we wondered around the village one afternoon, we witnessed a group of students and a teacher carrying a tripod. A tripod sticks out like a sore thumb in the village—especially to a photographer. We had to stop them! They briefly explained that they were shooting a movie about Nangi. Of course, this sparked our [...]
Mushroom project
Just east of the Himanchal School lies a small wooden building where sun shines through the cracks, down to the muddy ground. The place is full of fungus growing in hanging bags of straw. Two to three foot cut sections of trees line the walls of the building—a few mushrooms sprouting out of each and [...]
Revisiting the purpose of our mission
With any mission, in the midst, it’s important to go back and revisit why you’re doing it in the first place. Most project initiators can relate – you set goals, you make deadlines, you draw out a plan. Eventually, paths change, challenges arise, and unexpected setbacks occur. One day, you have all the motivation in [...]
Tele-medicine: connecting urban doctors with remote villagers
Dr. Samrat from the Kathmandu Model Hospital took a good half hour out of his morning to videoconference with us from the Nangi Clinic. We asked him several questions regarding the success and/or drawbacks from the tele-medicine efforts between the city and the remote village. Lila, who runs the clinic, sat in on the conference, [...]
Back to the basics: power
Just as the people of Nepal suffer from power outages – we are not exempt. We’ve been anxiously waiting for 2 days to update The Himalayan Gap blog after we’ve already been away for 7 days. With a lack of electricity and only limited battery power reserves, our computers eventually died – after spending as [...]
