The school that was built to take the next earthquake

The earthquake of April 2015 caused massive building damage to the school buildings in Chyangba Village. Among what it took down was the schoolhouse Education Elevated had built one year earlier.

What went up in its place in 2016 was drawn by an architect, built from the stone on the site, and named the Wongchu Biswa Darshan Lower Secondary School. It was inaugurated on 18 October 2016 and it is still the only earthquake resistant school in the region.

What the earthquake took

The 7.8 magnitude earthquake of 25 April 2015 was one of the most deadly disasters in Nepal’s history. Chyangba Village was badly damaged, and the damage included the schoolhouse.

That schoolhouse was one year old. A two storey building had gone up in 2014, the newest thing Education Elevated had put into the village, and 2015 was supposed to be a year of finishing touches rather than a year of starting again. Smokeless stoves were installed in the village that year and the two storey classroom buildings were dedicated.

Education Elevated had been working in Chyangba since 2008, and until that April the work had been the ordinary work of a school: paint, classroom furniture, library shelving, uniforms, a levelled playground. The earthquake changed the size of the question.

Not all school aged children in this part of Nepal had a safe or accessible school even before the earthquake. Many had to walk for hours to reach the nearest one, and the nearest one was a stone and clay structure with dirt floors, tables and chairs. A village that loses its own school does not fall back on a spare.

The decision to rebuild

The rebuild happened in 2016, on an initiative of Pemba Dorjee Sherpa, who grew up in Chyangba Village and has summited Everest twice. He owns and operates Sherpa Adventure International and lives in Golden, Colorado, with his wife Moni.

It was Pem who brought Education Elevated to the village in the first place. Gerri Kier met him and Moni on a Rotary hiking day in July 2006 around Cotton Wood Pass outside Buena Vista, Colorado, and it was Pem who suggested she take on trekking in Nepal by hiking to Everest Base Camp. The first team walked into Chyangba in May 2008. Ten years after that hiking day he was the one who started the rebuild.

Gerri Kier and a team of volunteers at Education Elevated worked with the Nepali Relief Fund group out of Indiana and an architect from Kathmandu to build a new building using earthquake resistant technology.

The word to hold on to in that sentence is technology. The village had rebuilt before. What it had not done before was rebuild to a specification designed for the next earthquake rather than for the last one, which is a different and more expensive undertaking than putting the same walls back up.

Drawings first

An architect in Kathmandu drew the building before anyone in the village moved a stone. The renderings show a two storey block with an outside staircase at one end, a covered balcony running along the first floor, and a row of tall windows on each level.

Drawings matter more here than they would in a town with a building inspector. Everything about the finished school that makes it earthquake resistant is invisible in a photograph: the proportions, the way the openings are placed in the walls, the timber that ties the stonework together. It is all decided on paper and then carried up a hill.

The renderings settle the plan as well as the look of it. The classrooms are reached from an open balcony rather than an internal corridor, and the staircase sits outside the walls, so every room opens straight onto the outside air.

There is a second set of drawings for the same building, in line rather than colour: a section, a ground floor and first floor plan, and front and back elevations, all of them dimensioned. They sit in the photo album alongside the pictures of the damage, which is the right place for them.

Stone, frames and a roof

Stone is what the site has. The photographs of the build show cut stone spread across the whole ground around the walls, waiting to go up, and the walls themselves rising course by course with timber frames set into them as they go.

The order is plain enough to read from the pictures. Frames go in as the walls come up rather than being cut into them afterwards. The joists for the balcony project from the stonework before there is a balcony to stand on. The roof goes on last, and the paint after that.

The finished building carries its name board on the balcony, in Nepali and in English, above the door.

Everything in those photographs had to reach the site first. Chyangba is an eight to ten hour drive from Kathmandu and then a walk, and the cut stone lying across the foreground of every frame was stacked there before a single course went up. A building like this one is measured in what can be carried as much as in what can be drawn.

The name, and the day it opened

The school is named the Wongchu Biswa Darshan Lower Secondary School. It was inaugurated on 18 October 2016.

The teams who had funded the project trekked to the village that year to dedicate the new schoolhouse, and the photographs from the 2016 trek show them with the village students, the teachers and the village leaders. The dedication was for new earthquake resistant school buildings, in the plural.

Eighteen months separate the earthquake from the inauguration. That is the gap between a village losing its school and getting a better one back, across a monsoon, on a site that can only be reached by road and then on foot.

It remains the only earthquake resistant school in the region.

What the building has done since

It takes 56 children through primary school every year.

It is described as the most popular school on the Chyangba Mountain, and the reason is not the paint. Despite the constant threat of earthquakes to the communities of Nepal, this is still the only earthquake resistant school in the region, and a parent who does not feel safe sending a child into a building keeps the child at home.

Alongside the school there is the hostel. Education Elevated pays for accommodation for girls who live too far to walk to school every day, on the principle that where a child lives should not decide whether that child is educated, and the families pay nothing. Twenty girls board for the ten month school year.

The dormitory that houses them, just below the school campus, was finished in February 2026. Each girl has her own bed and bedding, and the building has a study room, a shared dining area and running water.

Teams have walked back in since. A team trekked to the village and on to Everest Base Camp in 2018, and another walked in and saw the school and the hostel in use.

The work in Chyangba did not start with a building and it has never been only about buildings. The first team, in May 2008, painted the school building and the classrooms, went over the plans for the library and media centre, and levelled the playground so that a dental camp could be held there that October. The 2009 team built new classroom furniture, refurbished what was already there, put up the library shelving and seating, and handed new uniforms to every child, to the teachers and to the Head Master.

Paint, furniture, shelving and uniforms are what a school needs once it has a building it can safely use. The earthquake moved the question back a step, and the answer took until October 2016.

What is not finished

A building has an end date. A school year does not.

A school year in Chyangba costs $22,200. It pays the teachers, buys the uniforms and the supplies, and keeps twenty beds made. Every dollar raised is applied to the campaign it was raised for, so a gift to one of those lines stays on that line.

Two of them exist because nothing else covers them. Students in Nepal are required by law to have a school uniform, and often the only barrier between a child and their education is that their parents cannot afford the school mandated attire. Nepali students also need English to reach better jobs and higher wages, and the government will not pay salaries for English teachers.

The longer plan runs past Chyangba. Education Elevated is working towards more earthquake resistant schools in the surrounding region, and particularly towards an earthquake safe middle school that most children in the nearby villages could attend. Without an earthquake resistant building, many parents do not feel safe sending their children to school, enrolment falls, and the gap in what those students learn widens.

The next expedition leaves on 20 September 2026 for Chyangba Village and Pikey Peak, with every vertical foot backed by individual sponsors. The team is being put together now.

Questions