It started in 1991 with two friends, ex-servicemen Tom Langridge and Chandra Bahadur Gurung of the Queen’s Gurkha Engineers, who shared a mission to build a replacement school in Chandra’s home village in the remote hill region of west Nepal. On a visit to Chandra’s family in Pokharithok, the two friends went to see the local school and were shocked to see a dilapidated building and its lack of educational facilities and furniture for the children. They witnessed the school children with bare feet on mud-floored classrooms, solid logs for benches, no running water or toilets, and cattle roaming free using the school as a shelter.

That evening during a meeting around a bonfire, the two friends committed to building a new school in this remote mountain village with the help of the local community. One villager offered the plot of land and others offered to carry additional building materials on the two day trek from the road head to the school site. Given its remote location, as much was done on-site as possible; from digging and sieving the clay to molding, drying and firing the compressed earth bricks, all twenty-thousand of them. 

Back in the UK, Tom enlisted the generous help of friends and family to raise the funds needed to build the school, while Chandra stayed in Nepal to oversee and manage the build. It took two years to complete the double-storey school with nine classrooms and a toilet block, and it was a testament to their friendship, and the friendship between the UK and Nepal, just as it is with the Gurkha community. 

Tom shared this story with Trevor Clifton, with whom he met as a Royal Engineer and later both went on to serve with the Gurkha Engineers. Trevor wrote about the success of the school in an article for the Head Teacher’s Review which inspired Howard Green, a Head Teacher at Michael School on the Isle of Man, to make contact. He invited Tom to give a talk to the whole school community on working with legendary Gurkha soldiers and raising funds for the school and its construction which captured the hearts and imagination of a whole new audience. The Kirk Michael community rallied together, raising enough money for a second school to be built in Ghamrang, Lamjung, west Nepal. And so Pahar Trust Nepal was formed.