Lungthung Hostel

Lungthung

The Story of two little Girls

While trekking in Nepal, we met two young girls on the trail. We asked them, “What do you prefer, to stay at home or to go to school”? One of the girl smiled and replied “to go to school”. Then again, we asked, but why do you like to go to school? She said “she can play and study in school. But at home, she has to work.”

In fact, besides their parent’s financial condition, going to school itself is a challenge for these kids of mountainous regions of Nepal.
Due to the rugged landscape and limited agricultural land, all the houses are scattered in the mountain. Therefore, these kids have to go through many obstacles on their way to school. Every day they have to walk 2-4 hours to reach their school. Moreover, the school trail gets much more dangerous during the monsoon season due to numerous landslides areas, river floods, and risk of snakes bites. Besides the natural obstacles, they have to work at home before and after school, making them very tired and not motivated for learning.
The people living higher up in the mountains do not send their kids to school, especially low-income family, because of distance and financial issues.

Lunghtung Village

Lungthung is a small scattered village in the far north-east of Nepal. A village close to the borders of Tibet and India. Most of the habitants are Sherpa people. The village is a passage for travelers coming down from the high mountain villages to the bigger town to purchase annual goods. There is a small school in the village, with classes from 1 to 6 and three teachers.

Why do we want to build a hostel in Lungthung?

Between 2016 to 2021, we have rebuilt 3 schools for more than 500 kids that were destroyed in 2015 by the earthquake, which seriously affected Nepal – Shree Leptung Secondary School, Shree Palep Primary School and Shree Adhamara Primary School. After completing the school buildings, we gave them back to the local authorities and villagers. But later, we realised that the education quality of some of these schools remained very poor. Due to the handover, our involvement in the school management became very limited, and we could therefore not do a lot to improve the education quality. However, we are still thinking and analysing how we can improve the education quality of these schools, without interfering much in the school administration.
With these thoughts, we came to the idea to build a hostel in the Lungthung village. The fees of 50 kids are generously supported by NORQAIN.

The prime aim of building a hostel in Lungthung is thus to provide access to education for kids of low-income families, and those who are living far in isolated areas and provide them with quality education, fundamental notions of health and hygiene, culture and social responsibility. We can only achieve these points by a constant supervision from Butterfly Help Project; it is more than just building a school.