Twenty beds, and a room that stays warm

The dormitory in Chyangba was finished in February 2026. It sits just below the school campus, and twenty girls who live too far to walk sleep there for the ten month school year.

Chyangba Village is in the Solukhumbu District of Nepal, in the Everest region. Education Elevated has worked there since 2008, and the dormitory is the most recent piece of that work. Three Rotary clubs paid for it, materials and lumber came up from Kathmandu, and local contractors put it up.

Why the girls board

Distance is the reason the dormitory exists. Not all school aged children in this part of Nepal had a safe or accessible school, and many had to walk for hours to reach the nearest one, a stone and clay structure with dirt floors. Chyangba has its own school now, but a school several hours from home is still several hours from home. Twenty girls live too far to walk it, and without a bed on the campus they do not attend.

They board for the ten month school year and it costs their families nothing. That is deliberate. 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. The same arithmetic applies to a bed. A family that cannot find the money for a uniform will not find it for board, and a dormitory that charged for a place would shut out the students it was built for.

The school year runs ten months. For a boarder that is ten months of sleeping, eating and studying in the same place, which is why the building had to be more than a room with beds in it.

What changes for a boarder is the shape of the day. The walk comes off both ends of it, and the hours that used to go on the trail go somewhere else. That is the whole argument for the building.

The school takes 56 children through primary school every year, and twenty beds are made for the ones who cannot get there and back in a day. The dormitory is not a separate institution. It is the part of the school that stays open at night.

Before

The girls shared floor mattresses laid side by side in one room. There was nowhere to keep anything and nowhere to study, and they ate in shifts because the room could not hold all of them at once.

The room worked as a place to sleep and not much else. Homework needs a surface and a light. Eating in two sittings takes twice as long out of the same evening. Twenty girls and everything they own on one floor is a room that has to be cleared before anything else can happen in it.

None of this was for a night or two. It was the arrangement for a ten month school year, repeated every year, for the girls whose families lived too far away for any other option.

The build

Ground was cleared in August 2025. The frame was up by September, the interior work ran through the winter, and the roof went on before February. Timber came in by road and then on foot, the same way everything reaches the village.

The site is rocky, and the first stretch of the work went on clearing it and preparing the ground for the foundation. Materials and lumber came up from Kathmandu. Local contractors began construction in September and carried the building through to February.

The dormitory stands just below the school campus, a short walk down the hill from the school yard. The distance between where the girls sleep and where they are taught is now a few minutes on foot.

Who paid for it

The Bainbridge Island Rotary Club of Washington led the funding, with the Rotary Club of Denver Mile High and the Erie Colorado Rotary Club. Bruce Ward of the Telluride Rotary Club donated the computers that now sit in the study room.

Four Rotary clubs appear in that paragraph: three that funded the building and one whose member furnished the study room. Erie, Denver Mile High and Telluride are all Colorado clubs, and Education Elevated is a Colorado nonprofit, a 501(c)(3) tax exempt corporation registered in Lafayette. Bainbridge Island, the club that led the funding, is in Washington.

Rotary has been in this story from the start. Gerri Kier met Pem and Moni Sherpa on a Rotary hiking day in July 2006, walking around Cotton Wood Pass outside Buena Vista, Colorado. Pem suggested she take on trekking in Nepal by hiking to Everest Base Camp, the trek went on the schedule for May 2008, and out of those conversations came both the fundraising idea and Education Elevated. Nearly twenty years later, three Rotary clubs paid for a building in the village Pem grew up in.

Twenty girls used to share floor mattresses side by side. Each one now has her own bed.

What it is like now

Each girl has her own sleeping space, her own bed and bedding, and somewhere to put her things. There is a shared dining area big enough for everyone at once, a study room, and running water.

Everyone eats together now. Against a new roof and running water that sounds like a small thing, but eating in shifts was never about the food. It was about a room that could not hold twenty people at once, and that room has been replaced.

The donated computers sit in the study room, which is the other thing the old arrangement did not have. There was nowhere to study before. There is now, and it is in the same building the girls sleep in.

The building does nothing clever. It gives twenty girls a bed each, a room to work in, water that runs, and a meal they all sit down to at the same time, and it does that for ten months of the year without asking their families for anything.

The building is finished. The school year is not: teachers, uniforms, books and warm coats are what keep the classroom full once the trekkers go home.

What a vertical foot pays for

Education Elevated raises money by climbing. Each trekker takes on individual sponsors who pledge against every vertical foot of elevation gained, and a single expedition gains thousands of them. The name is a description of the method rather than a slogan. The elevation is the fundraising.

A school year in Chyangba costs $22,200. It pays the teachers, buys the uniforms and supplies, and keeps twenty beds made. Those are separate campaigns, and every dollar raised is applied to the campaign it was raised for, so a pledge made against a climb goes to the line it was given for.

Part of that list exists because nothing else covers it. Nepali students need English to reach better jobs and higher wages, but the government will not pay salaries for English teachers. That salary has to come from somewhere, and in Chyangba it comes from the mountain.

Two kinds of money reach Chyangba. One pays for a structure and stops when the structure is standing, which is what the three Rotary clubs did here. The other is the running cost of the school, and no single gift ever finishes it.

The dormitory was a build with its own funders and an end date. The school year has neither. It comes round every ten months, and the twenty beds in the new building have to be made again each time.

Eighteen years in one village

The list in order shows the pattern. The early teams worked on what a classroom needs: paint, furniture, shelving, uniforms. Then came buildings, then a building that could survive an earthquake, and now a building for the hours when school is not in session.

It starts in May 2008. The first team trekked to Everest Base Camp and continued to Island Peak, and four of them, Julie Lilienkamp, Gerri Kier, Brandi Rush and Dan Rush, walked on to Chyangba Village. They painted the school building and the classrooms, went over the plans for the library and media center, and levelled the playground so a dental camp could be held there that October.

The 2009 team built new classroom furniture and 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. Part of that team carried on into the Everest region to raise more, including a climb of Lobuche Peak.

A two storey schoolhouse went up in 2014. The April 2015 earthquake destroyed it. Also in 2015, smokeless stoves were installed in the village and the two storey classroom buildings were dedicated.

The school standing in Chyangba today was rebuilt in 2016 to withstand the next earthquake. It was an initiative of Pemba Dorjee Sherpa, built with the Nepali Relief Fund of Indiana and an architect from Kathmandu. It is named 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.

A team trekked to the village and on to Everest Base Camp in 2018. Another walked back in during 2024 and saw the school and the hostel in use. The next expedition leaves on 20 September 2026 for Chyangba Village and Pikey Peak. The dormitory will be standing when they arrive.

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