SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2019
BACKPACKER.COM 87T
HE TRUCK PULLED UP in a cloud of dust and
parked in front of a storage shed. More than a dozen
people stopped what they were doing. Shovels and
paintbrushes and hammers fell to the ground.
Wheelbarrows were abandoned. At first I was con-
fused. Was the truck delivering cold drinks? No. The
back was filled with at least 100 bags of cement and they had to be
unloaded, fast. I’ve never seen so many people stop working hard so
they could work harder.
Each bag of cement weighed 110 pounds, and some of the people
lining up to carry them weighed only a little more. I joined the line
and can confirm: lugging the bags 30 feet in the hot sun was the defi-
nition of back-breaking work. But someone turned up the music on
the portable speaker, the pace picked up, and in 20 minutes the bags
stood neatly stacked in the shed. Anyone watching this drill might
have assumed that the workers were being paid to stay on schedule.
But they weren’t being paid at all. They were volunteers.
We cement-slingers, along with about 60 other volunteers, were
part of a school-building project in rural eastern Nepal. I had come
with a team of BACKPACKER readers to help the post-earthquake
recovery effort, and though we expected to work hard, day one was
still an eye-opener. I knew this was no ordinary volunteer effort when
I saw an Australian running uphill with a wheelbarrow full of dirt.
There was a sense of urgency—a contagious enthusiasm that said,
“Let’s get this done!”
And no wonder. The kids who needed this school walked right by the
worksite everyday on their way to classes in a temporary building—a
building that might not survive the next earthquake.
The local community, and others like it, had been in this precarious
position since April of 2015, when a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck
Nepal. The damage was catastrophic. That quake and subsequent
tremors devastated the country, killing more than 9,000 people. The
world was quick to respond with emergency aid, but as often happens
with international disasters, global attention soon moved on.
But the need didn’t. One of the most pressing issues was—and still
is—how the earthquake disrupted education. More than 5,000 schools
were damaged or destroyed. That kind of destruction ta kes years, not
months, to fix, and inadequate education could set an entire genera-
tion back. At BACKPACKER, we felt a special obligation. After all, for
hikers, Nepal has been a dream destination for decades, and readers
and editors alike have been inspired by its mountains, people, and cul-
ture. I’d trekked here 30 years ago and the experience was so vivid, I
still remember almost every detail. It was like an old friend’s house
had burned down. So we asked ourselves: What can we do?
A lot, it turns out. We invited BACKPACKER readers to join us on a
special mission: go to Nepal and work as well as walk. There’s nothing
wrong with making a donation or simply contributing to the economy
through travel, but nothing compares to rolling up your sleeves and get-
ting dirty. So we partnered with the nonprofit All Hands and Hearts,
which does short- and long-term disaster relief all over the world. In
Nepal, the organization focuses on school-building because that’s
where it can be the most effective. “We look for places that are the high-
est priority with the hardest logistics,” Jane Coughlin, the Nepal pro-
gram director, told me. (They’ve built 20 schools here since 2015.)
Last spring, two separate teams of BACKPACKER readers — 30
of us total—traveled to Sindhuli, where All Hands and Hearts was
building three schools (a fourth had been completed). After an all-day
journey from Kathmandu by bus and four-wheel-drive, we arrived
at basecamp: a rainbow of tents on a hilltop surrounded by terraced
fields. The air was hazy with smoke from agricultural fires, making
the sunset a ball of neon orange.
At the evening gathering, volunteers from 27 countries—ranging
from gap-year teenagers to retired septuagenarians—welcomed usto the family. We introduced ourselves one by one, and each time
the crowd cheered and made sure they knew exactly where we were
from and why we decided to come here.
Work started at 7:30 a.m. the next day and it wasn’t long after my
first encounter with cement bags that I met them again. The genera-
tor powering the concrete mixer broke down, so we needed to mix the
stuff by hand. The drill went like this: Dump a pile of cement onto a
metal sheet, add gravel, add water, and turn it with a shovel faster than
the water can drain away. Again, the pace neared frantic, as pairs of
shovelers tag-teamed like it was a wrestling match. After all, we had
to keep the masons supplied with fresh concrete. And the generator
broke down a lot.
While the volunteers did unskilled labor—mixing, digging,
painting—the masonry was done by a paid crew of Nepalese. That
team included local women who were in the process of being
trained as masons so that they could find work after the school was
built. One of them, Pabitra Thakuri, told me that she would be ableTop: Local kids walk up to 2 or 3 miles over steep hills to reach school;
a Nepalese mason at work