Hello everyone! This is Edmond from Hong Kong :) I am now fundraising for money to build a classroom in Nepal. 

Last year I spent five magical months in a mountain village called Gaunshahar in Nepal, next to the Annupurna circuit. While staying there, all the volunteers are needed to go to a school to help out. We taught in classes, tutored, held library and computer lab sessions, played football with kids, took them to school and back home, cleaned, built, and had tons of fun.

Shamser is the principal and founder of Heaven Hill Academy. We stayed at his place with his family. All volunteers ate food together every morning and evening. Then we had sharing and apprecition time. 

The handsome man Shamser Thapa himself: teacher and founder of the school, father of 2, and a whooping finalist of British Varkey Foundation's Top 50 Global Teacher Prize 2019!

Shamser is a busy man who always gets ideas on his head and runs around the mountain to do stuff. He is looked up by all the kids in school. All the kids listen to him attentively when he is teaching English, maths, science and such. After class he kicks football with them. And after school he is always thinking about how to improve and sustain his schools for the kids.

Growing up being beaten constantly, he realised beating is never an ideal way to make children learn, but sadly, there's such culture in Nepalese schools. And the fact that schools charge parents everything before students could even use the facilities make him create the school, aiming to provide a fair, free and quality education to all kids, despite their caste and how rich/poor they are. 

Shamser gave a speech about his ideas on TEDx, listen to it and get enlightened.

Both the depth and scale of his project are out of my league of writing so what would be better than watch these two videos that Sarah, a volunteer, made last year in applying to the Teacher Prize! 

Bombarding you with A LOT of information (sorry!) is to make sure you understand the ideology and background of school that this campaign is fundraising for. Be it little or every detail, the more you know the more confident we are on our support from all over the world! Now Shamser has asked me, on behalf of him, to ask for donation for our Saring project to build a new classroom.



Background (Oct 2018)

Last year the bunch of us (Shamser, local builders, volunteers, 264.education) got together at a village called Saring. We worked really hard, from sunrise to sunset, non stop for the whole October, and we successfully built five classrooms for New Vision Learning Academy! 

Now that the kids have a school out of concrete floors, bricks and metal rooftops to be at and they are more than happy to be studying in there. A big THANK-YOU to everyone who had put effort and help, time and physical energy, money and wishes to help us make all the classrooms rise! Shamser is running the school in the same style as Heaven Hill Academy. So rest assured, there's no beating of children, kids are having diverse curriculum of learning, there's no discrimination of their caste or financial ability. A free and quality English-medium education!

Having expanded his ideology to another village, Shamser is facing constant opposition from other schools and the committee members who have the authority to grant him the permission to run each grade in school. But Shamser never gives up! Politics is also another challenge but he is often quite optimistic about it.



Fundraising project (Apr 2020)

The five classrooms we built last year are used for (1) nursery, (2) lower kindergarten, (3) upper kindergarten, (4) library and (5) teacher office.

But let me tell you a little secret.......Kids GROW UP! 

WHAT?!

Surprise surprise!

Now as the new school year is approaching in Nepal, they need a brand new classroom for grade-one kids.  

The way to build the new classroom will be more or less the same as last time we built the whole school. Led by Shamser and the few professional builders. Volunteers come to help assist (e.g. passing materials like rocks and bricks, mixing mortar and concrete, digging, etc.) And this is also a Nepalese style of construction: we simply dig deep into the ground and lay big rocks as foundation, puzzling smaller rocks and lay a concrete floor, put up walls with bricks and iron rods, and finally a wooden and metal rooftop. 

Here's a video we took last year in Saring on how we built everything from scratch. (thanks to both Davids from Texas and Spain)
https://www.facebook.com/1951212471808199/videos/152487405687987/ 

And some photos:

So now, Shamser is kindly asking everyone to donate some money so he could buy all the materials for this new classroom and hire a few professional workers for assistance. 



Division of fund

Here is the list of the estimated materials' costs (in USD$):

Bricks (walls)   $700
Rocks (fundation)   $150
Iron rods (walls and pillars)   $60
Sand (concrete/mortar use)   $150
Small rocks (concrete use)   $150
Cement   $350
Workers' salary   $600
Door   $70
Window   $75
Wood (roof)   $300
Metal sheet (roof)   $330
Nails   $10
Transportation of materials   $150
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Total of $3095 / ~HKD$24200     (exchange rate 1:7.78)
 

Timeline

Since Shamser is planning to start work on April 2020, I am starting this fundraising campaign in the hope of gathering the amount we need before end of December 2019, and once I gather all the money I will transfer to Shamser and he will buy everything he needs. 



Proof/credibility

I will generate the amount I will get from all of your kindness and upload all the proofs there are in here. 

For those who have met or known me during those five months in Nepal knew that I want nothing more than providing a happy and well-rounded education to the kids because they deserve it as much as we do. If you have met me in person then I am sure you trust me. If you haven't, you are always welcomed to message me and ask about the project more! I am quite awesome (hehe :)) and I am trying my best. 



Last but not least, Shamser and I really appreciate all your kindness and help in order to help sustaining a free, quality and beating-free environment for our future superstars.

Thank you everyone 
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