ARCHIVE of Earlier Stories

Before- Dawa Thukmo D026 and Dawa Lhamo D031

Dawa Thukmo and Lhamo are from one of the hilly districts bordering Tibet.Their father died a few years ago, leaving them and their mother landless and without resources. The girls couldn't go to school...they hadn't enough money. Instead, they worked, gathering firewood.

The older brother Pemba was helping this family from his pay as a trekking guide, but with fighting in the Everest region, the trekking industry died. Pemba, who has a Grade 3 education (but speaks several languages) next came to Kathmandu to try earn a living. He eventually found a job as a taxi driver, which is how I met him, in 2000.

I was taken by his honesty (19 out of 20 taxi drivers will cheat you blind) and by his obvious intelligence. We had been talking about education and about how Nepal's future (and democracy) depend upon educating her people. At some point, Pemba asked me if he could put his sisters on the waiting list as boarders. The wait for boarding would have been 4 or 5 years, so I counter-offered that if he could bring his sisters to live with him near the school, I would manage to squeeze them in as day students.

When I notified Pemba he could bring Thukmo and Lhamo to school he came to tell me that he can't bring the girls...there was heavy fighting in his district. Communication and transport lines were cut. Food couldn't be flown in because the helicopters had all been pressed into military service and the army was imposing communication, transport, food and medicine embargoes. Pemba couldn't go in because the Maoists would have force him to join them. The army would likely have shot or disappeared him. (As a Mongolian type, he matched the profile of 'rebel'.) And he couldn't send for the girls because of the embargo. Besides, the Maoists were firebombing buses. Pemba couldn't get word about his mother and sisters. He was sick with worry that they were starving.

To add to his sorrows, the taxi owner had sold the car because the economy was in freefall. So Pemba was out of work, worried about his family on the border and without any resources to feed his wife and three children here in Kathmandu. He had taken his two older children out of school because he'd run out of money. During these years, the Kathmandu valley mushroomed from 600,000 to 2.5 million souls. So many were displaced by the war.

Pemba managed to get his sisters and his mum out of their district. The girls joined us in 2004. With peace talks on, and UN supervision of both armies as they decommission their weapons, the future is looking brighter for Nepal and for this Sherpa family.