Uniform day in Chyangba

Students in Nepal are required by law to have a school uniform. Often the only barrier between a child and their education is that their parents are unable to afford the school mandated attire.

So the uniforms get bought and handed out, and a day goes on the itinerary for it. A team trekked to Chyangba Village and on to Everest Base Camp in 2018, and the photographs from that trip are of children being fitted.

A law, and a price a family cannot pay

Gerri Kier met Pem and Moni Sherpa on a Rotary hiking day in July 2006, around Cotton Wood Pass outside Buena Vista, Colorado. Pem, who grew up in Chyangba, suggested she take on trekking in Nepal by hiking to Everest Base Camp, and she decided to turn the trek into a fundraising effort for the villages she would walk through. It took eighteen months of work to get Education Elevated off the ground before the first team left in May 2008.

Through many discussions with Pem she found three recurring barriers keeping students in these rural Nepali villages out of school.

The first was distance and the building itself. Not all school aged children had a safe or accessible school, and many had to walk for hours to reach the nearest one, which was a stone and clay structure with dirt floors and tables and chairs for a work space.

The third was language. Nepali students need English to reach better jobs and higher wages, but the government will not pay salaries for English teachers, which leaves students without the skill and the village inside a cycle it cannot break on its own.

The second barrier is the one this page is about, and it is the strangest of the three because it is the smallest. A school stands, a teacher is paid, a place is open, and a child does not take it because of the cost of a jacket and a pair of trousers.

Often the only barrier between a child and their education is that their parents cannot afford the school mandated attire.

The first handover, in 2009

Uniforms were not the first thing Education Elevated did in Chyangba. The first team walked in during May 2008, painted the school building and the classrooms, looked over the plans for the library and media centre, and levelled the playground so a dental camp could be held there that October.

The following year the work moved inside. The 2009 team built new classroom furniture and refurbished what was already there, constructed the library shelving and seating, and handed new uniforms to every child, to the teachers and to the Head Master.

Every child, the teachers and the Head Master. That is the whole school in one afternoon, and it set the pattern for what a uniform day is: not a selection, not a means test, everybody.

Part of that team carried on into the Everest region afterwards to raise more, including a climb of Lobuche Peak.

The 2018 team

A team trekked to Chyangba Village and on to Everest Base Camp in 2018. The village stop came with a khata welcome ceremony, days in the classrooms, and a uniform day.

By then the school the children were queueing outside was the one rebuilt in 2016 after the earthquake, the Wongchu Biswa Darshan Lower Secondary School, still the only earthquake resistant school in the region. The building was two years old and the uniforms were new that morning.

That trip did the two things an Education Elevated expedition usually does. It stopped in the village, where the team was welcomed with khata scarves, sat in on lessons and spent time at the girls’ hostel. Then it went on into the Everest region, because the elevation gained on the second half is what the sponsors at home had pledged against.

The mission is written as supporting and promoting education and eliminating economic barriers in primary and secondary schools in needy communities. A uniform day is the smallest, most literal version of that sentence anyone will ever see.

The school on the other end of it

Chyangba Village sits in the Solukhumbu District of Nepal, in the Everest region. Its primary school was the first thing Education Elevated ever supported, and it has been the single focus of the organisation since 2008.

The school takes 56 children through primary school every year. The building they attend went up in 2016, after the April 2015 earthquake destroyed the schoolhouse that had been finished the year before. It was rebuilt on an initiative of Pemba Dorjee Sherpa, with the Nepali Relief Fund group out of Indiana and an architect from Kathmandu, using earthquake resistant technology, and it was inaugurated on 18 October 2016.

It is described as the most popular school on the Chyangba Mountain, and it is the only earthquake resistant one in the region. Parents who do not feel safe sending a child into a building do not send the child, which is the uniform problem in another form: a place at a school that a family cannot take up is not a place.

What the day looks like

It starts as a queue along the front of the school building, children in order, adults working from the doorway with the boxes.

Then it becomes fitting. Somebody kneels on the stony ground and works around a child: sleeves pushed back to the right length, a zip tried, a trouser leg turned up, shoes put on and laced. Every garment has to fit a specific person, and the smallest children need an adult at ground level to get it done.

It takes as long as it takes. Nobody is handed a bag and sent away with it, because a uniform that does not fit is not a uniform a child can wear to school for ten months, and the point of the day is that every child leaves it dressed.

The last stage is the one the children do themselves, which is to stand in it. There is a moment on every one of these days when a child who arrived in whatever they own walks off wearing the same thing as everyone else in the school.

What is on the jacket

The uniform is a navy tracksuit, jacket and trousers, with red piping down the sleeves and the legs, worn over a green and red top.

The jacket carries two marks. On one side of the chest is the Education Elevated mountain badge. On the other is the name of the school, embroidered in white, and the same name runs in red letters across the back so that a line of children walking away from you reads as a school.

None of that is decoration for the donors. A uniform is what the law asks for, and what the law asks for is the school mandated attire, which means the school’s name has to be on it. The badge is the only part that is about anyone outside the village.

Uniforms are a line in the school year

A school year in Chyangba costs $22,200. The yearly operating budget covers four initiatives: the girls’ hostel, student uniforms, teacher salaries and general school operations.

Uniforms are the second of those and the one that has to be repeated. Children grow, a school year is ten months long, and the 56 children who go through primary school there every year are not the same 56 children.

Every dollar raised is applied to the campaign it was raised for, so a gift made against uniforms buys uniforms. The projects Education Elevated supports are funded by individual and company sponsors, and the school year is funded the same way.

The same arithmetic that applies to a jacket applies to a bed. Twenty girls who live too far from Chyangba to walk in and out each day board on the campus for the ten month school year, and it costs their families nothing. A family that cannot find the money for a uniform is not going to find it for board, and a hostel that charged would shut out the students it exists for. The dormitory those girls sleep in, just below the school, was finished in February 2026.

Who goes next

Education Elevated raises the money for all of this 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.

The next expedition leaves on 20 September 2026 for Chyangba Village and Pikey Peak. It follows the road out of Kathmandu, spends days in the village at the school, and then climbs. The team is being put together now.

The uniforms in these photographs were bought with money raised the same way, by people who walked uphill in Nepal with a list of sponsors behind them, so that a child in a village could put on a jacket with a school’s name on the back and go in.

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