[CSN] transforms the quality of education in Nepal’s public schools in partnership with local government. We achieve this by directly managing some schools and through providing curriculum materials and coaching to scores of other schools across the country. This film showcases what we have achieved in 2025-26 and the values that drive us. We would like to express our gratitude to our teachers, staff members, local government partners and donors who help us to put students first.
A number of people who have expressed concern about the situation in Nepal or specifically about the impact on my colleagues and friends there.
As you know there has been devastating recent flooding in China and Nepal. The impact appears greatest along the Trishuli River and the hydropower plants. There are more than 1000 dead and 4000 missing.
The Guardian has fairly good coverage of the floods in Nepal and Tibet. Unfortunately, the recent flooding may be just a harbinger of disasters to come. The Himalayan glaciers are part of what has been called Earth’s third pole. They are melting due to climate change, a process that threatens buildings, agriculture, and drinking water for nearly two billion people who live downstream.
My colleagues are located to a large part east of the flooding. As one says “The situation is truly terrible, and I fear the number of victims will continue to rise significantly. We are not operating in that region, so none of our schools or staff have been directly affected, but everyone is feeling the loss.”
The Nuwakot district has been a center for much of the destruction, but also as a site for refugees. It’s hilly there, so areas higher up are less affected. Susan and I visited there about ten years ago. We walked on one of the bridges that has been recently destroyed and stayed at Famous Farm Nuwakot, a rustic resort higher up.
I woke up to the disturbing news of a plane crash in Pokhara, Nepal. There are 68 confirmed dead.
The crash was at the just opened international airport. In order to build it, they had to take the tops off some nearby hills, or what we’d call mountains.
Rescue operations are difficult there because of the terrain and the lack of equipment.
Pokhara is sometimes described as a “resort town,” which it is, but it’s also Nepal’s second largest city after Kathmandu, and a major center for industry.
In “Realities of Implementing Community-Based Learning during Lockdown: Lessons from a Troubled Year,” Raunak Chaudhari, Smriti Karanjit Manandhar, and Bertram C. Bruce examine the fortunes and misfortunes they encountered implementing a program at King’s College in Kathmandu, Nepal. They had conceived the program as a meaningful experiment in education reform, an effort to connect classroom learning to the needs and desires of the world outside the university. Although the onset of the pandemic seriously altered the original design of the course, the course provided many valuable experiences as well as an important example of how the ambitions of integrated learning create conditions of adaptability that are well suited to emergent and emergency circumstances.
The Frames film program has produced a short video of my work in Nepal, focusing on the Fulbright Specialist trip in 2019. I hope you enjoy it.
The Frames Film Program provides opportunities for multi-barriered youth (ages 16 to 30) to learn the basics of filmmaking — at no cost. It is an off-site program of Frog Hollow Neighbourhood House. As a Vancouver-based film production and life skills program, it provides opportunities for youth to learn the basics of filmmaking in a supportive, safe and fun environment.
My heart aches when I think of the COVID-19 pandemic in Nepal. The situation is dire, worse than in neighboring India.
The latest data I’ve seen (e.g., from Our World in Data) shows a positivity rate in Nepal standing at 47%, meaning that many cases are missed and every other person is infected. The full vaccination rate is 1%. There is little chance to get shots unless the US steps up.
Several of my colleagues have had or currently have COVID-19, including one former student, various colleagues, and several attendees at workshops I led there.
On a recent video call, two people failed to show up because they were sick, one didn’t come because his mother was ill, one just didn’t show up. One showed up but was sick and didn’t say much. Only one was healthy.
The airport is now shut down, so it’s difficult to get oxygen. The health system is overrun. A colleague I trust, Shisir Khanal, has started a GoFundMe: Help People Breathe: Oxygen For Tulsipur to buy oxygen or concentrators. Efforts like that are important, but much more is needed.
The country’s only zoo in Jawalakhel was shut for 10 months due to the pandemic. After reopening, a cap of about a quarter of the usual number of visitors has been imposed. Not surprisingly, the zoo has struggled to stay afloat since it depends heavily on visitor fees. Now, it appears that they may not be able to pay staff or feed the animals.
The only hope may be a new Adopt-an-animal program. Would you like to save an Asian elephant, a one-horned rhino, or a royal Bengal tiger?
The US should treat COVID-19 as a global problem, not simply one of public health in within the US. It is a moral imperative to help Nepal (and other countries), but it also makes sense from the most selfish perspective.
People in the US are celebrating that COVID-19 seems to be at bay. But as the tale in India and other countries shows, early confidence is often undercut by the realities of the virus. The pandemic continues to rage in Nepal, India, other parts of Asia, South America, and Africa.
Widespread infection ignores national boundaries. New variants are not just possible, but inevitable, putting every person on the planet at risk. If we don’t stop the spread, the pandemic can easily return worse than ever in the US. At best it will haunt us for a very long time.
During February-March, 2019, I had a wonderful Fulbright Specialist experience hosted by King’s College in Kathmandu, Nepal. This followed on two previous trips to there to work with educators from K-12 through college levels, in and out of school.
Here’s a summary: Artificial intelligence has been imagined as powerful, intelligent, and autonomous (independent of human prejudices, power relations, etc.). While it is definitely powerful, it is neither intelligent nor autonomous. Benevolent use of AI calls for critical, socially engaged intelligence on the part of both technologists and ordinary citizens.
My evening flight from Kathmandu to Delhi was canceled, so I had to take one five hours earlier. Although I wasn’t happy about the resulting extra layover time, flying earlier in the day meant that I had a glorious panorama of the Himalayas most of the way. Since Delhi is directly west of Kathmandu the 500-mile flight path was as if made to order for the view.
The Himalayas are a feature of our world that call for silent awe, and need no supporting adjectives, such as “stunning” or “snow-covered.” They’re the antithesis of another, also beautiful, feature of our world, Cape Cod. Its glacial drift formations are a gentle lullaby to the Himalayan symphony.
However, as we flew along the southern edge of the grand plateau, I took my eyes, or ears, away from that symphony from time to time because I couldn’t put down the book I was reading. In The Path: A One-Mile Walk through the Universe. In the book, Chet Raymo describes the path he took for 37 years from his house in North Easton, Massachusetts to the Stonehill College campus where he taught physics and astronomy.
Just as we were passing from Nepal into India, I read this:
Millions of years ago India, drifting northward on the mobile surface of the earth, nudged into Asia and began pushing upward a double-thickness slab of the Earth’s crust known as the Tibetan plateau, the front range of which are the towering Himalayas.
Raymo goes on to explain how sunlight beating down on the plateau produces warm air. As it rises, moist air from the Indian Ocean takes its place. This creates the Indian monsoon cycle. Heavy rainwater combines chemically with the Himalayan rock. The weathering takes carbon dioxide out of the air.
As the mountains rose and eroded, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere decreased and Earth began to cool. On Northern continents ice sheets formed and moved across the land, grinding, abrading.
Thus, mountains in Asia caused glaciers in New England and those in turn built the Cape Cod beaches where we swim every summer. The symphony is magnificent, but it needs the lullaby to follow.
India continues its journey northward; the Himalayas continue to rise; the sun still beats down; the monsoons cycle onward, and the rains take carbon dioxide out of the air.
But don’t look for the glaciers to return anytime soon to build up more places to plant your beach umbrella. Our technologies are now overwhelming these natural processes. Combustion of fossil fuels is adding far more greenhouse gases to the air, warming the world and covering up those glacial sands with rising sea water.
Raithaane, near Patan Durbar Square, note the low overhead
The restaurant is a little hard to find at first. It’s about 300 meters east of Patan Durbar Square. The best route there is a walk through small alleyways.
Raithaane menu
Raithaane serves tasty, inexpensive, local food from many regions of Nepal. It’s all fresh and organic. As our waiter explained they use tomatoes only where it’s appropriate to the particular dish, not tomato sauce on everything.
Chamre & Yangben-Faksa (pork and lichen curry over rice)With Sujan, a friend we happened to see on the way backFriendly, informative serviceNo wasted space
Chip's journey 