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Ambiance of Kathmandu
Kathmandu - Saturday, April 1, 2000
DISPATCHES
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Hello Mountain Zone and a good morning to you. This is Vernon Tejas with Alpine Ascents reporting in from Kathmandu. Just got in town a couple of days ago, we've been pulling all of our act together, making sure that all of the equipment is up and running and all of the boxes that we meticulously packed in Seattle arrived, and picking up the first of our clients at the airport today. But today was big in lots of other ways. This morning we got up early to see the sunrise over at the Monkey Temple, just on the west end of town. Fascinating place, prayer wheels spinning, flags flying, monkeys begging, just a wonderful place to visit. We're hoping that we can have all of our climbers go out there before we actually head to the mountains and enjoy some of the local traditions and the ambiance of Kathmandu itself.
Another big thing that was fascinating for me was we were able to visit students at the Dorji School, which is a highly reputed education administration — a place of higher learning. This is also where Alpine Ascents' Foundation has been sponsoring six children from the Khumbu area — Sherpa children — to go to school, fully financing their room and their board and their books, and all of the things that kids need to actually participate in school. One of the things that we look for in sponsoring the kids there is that it's a situation where poverty-stricken family that would have no hope of actually getting their kids in school and we step in and try to give them that little extra help that they need to go and participate in the learning process. We've been involved with this for now a couple years and it's working real well. The kids we visited today looked like they are eager beavers all very good learners; one of them actually is one of the sharpest in the class. He had meningitis last year and this year he's the top-performer. So we're excited about that.
We actually took quite a few photos of the kids because they are just a riot to be with. They really enjoyed looking at our equipment — our camera equipment — and looking through it and seeing themselves on the back of the video viewer. It was just like they were on TV. So they enjoyed the heck out of that. We actually got to meet the principle who founded the school 18 years ago, a Mr. Dorji Lama. He's from Tibet originally, left there when he was five years old and crossed the mountains on foot, settled in Nepal and now has established this school and one of the main components of that is actually maintaining the traditions of the Tibetan language. So these kids even though they're only what we call 'senior kindergartners' are actually learning three different languages that would be Nepalese, Tibetan, and English. And are excelling despite that triple challenge that in my own days of being in school I knew it wasn't very hard to try to be fluent in three different languages when I was in kindergarten. We had a great reception over there and we're going to send some photos back to you so that you can enjoy them as well.
The only other thing that I'd just like to mention is even though today is April Fools, we've had a riotous good time and even though the one flight was late today our client did show and we thought that for a small, short amount of time that maybe he was playing a trick on us being it April 1st, but Lord have mercy we're going starting to see the team trickle in and tomorrow we are going to have the traditional blessing ceremony of the Lala for this expedition here in town, it is called the puja and we'll keep you informed on that. So join with us and be safe. Bye for now.
— Vern Tejas, Alpine Ascents Guide and MountainZone.com Correspondent
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