Rolwaling Development Update

Prof. Janice Sacherer Turner

This summary is based on two weeks of fieldwork done with the Rolwaling community in Kathmandu during late December 2006 and early January 2007. Interviews were conducted with individuals ranging from teenagers to late middle-aged adults, both male and female, and among both Rolwaling residents who were visiting for the winter, and Kathmandu based inhabitants. The culmination of this work was a formal meeting of the Rolwaling Mt. Everest Summiters Club, who presented me with three letters requesting three types of development aid, signed and sealed by the two highest ranking officers in the club present at the time. In the month since, I have received numerous emails informing me of the actions they are taking to utilize the small amount of money I gave them, give preliminary estimates on two projects, and also the precautions they are taking to make sure that all actions are done by community consensus and with financial transparency. There is a sense in the Rolwaling community that with current political developments, Nepal is on the verge of a new era of development.

Concerning some of the specific issues discussed in this conference, I have the following updated news.

Mountain Hazards.

Upon further checking I discovered that the avalanche that blocked the river temporarily in the past, was a snow avalanche which the river was able to melt through after a few days. The only major glacial hazard events which have occurred within living memory, are the Menlung La based flood of 1979 and the Ripimo Shar flood of 1990. Given the approximately 135 - 150 year history of habitation in the valley, this lends itself in local eyes, to the perception that such incidences are increasing. As for Tsho Rolpa, they unanimously trust in western technology and believe that there is no further danger because of the amelioration work already done.

Perceived Development Needs:

River Containment

Opinion was unanimous that the most pressing need of the Rolwaling community is control and containment of the Rolwaling River across from Beding. It has ruined potato fields, and destroyed three houses and the traditional village Chorten, while continuing to eat away at the hillside that the rest of Beding is located on, especially during the monsoon. One unsettled issue is whether this water erosion is the result of too much water being released from Tsho Rolpa or simply a natural process. If further studies should show that Tsho Rolpa needs further or faster draining in the future, then it will be imperative to construct such a wall before further draining is done. In either case, the solution is obviously a retaining wall to direct the river back to its original bed.

A river containment project however, requires scientific appraisal of the current situation with the Tsho Rolpa moraine, expert engineering, and a lot of money. To this effect, I have located Nick Arding, a British teacher and former Royal Marine and Everest climber, who is visiting Rolwaling this spring with some of his students. He will take photographs at the direction of Dr. John Reynolds of Reynolds Geophysics to try to make a current estimate-at-a-distance as to what is happening with Tsho Rolpa before a containment system can be designed by anyone for the future. Meanwhile, Dr. Ruedi Baumgartner, Director of a Swiss development institute in Zurich (ETH) and author of a book in German about Rolwaling, has offered to explain the situation to the local head of Swiss Development Cooperation when he visits Kathmandu this March. The director of SDC has already trekked to Rolwaling twice and the Swiss installed a still working water reservoir and tap stand in Beding some 40 years ago. Currently they are reconstructing an improved trail to Simigaon.

There are further encouraging signs that there is international governmental interest in the project. The fact that four feet of snow fell in Beding during the month of February means that there will be larger snow run off than usual this year, and the project is all the more urgent. A preliminary measure of the length of the river needing containment was 240 feet in length.

Gompa Restoration

The second "emergency" priority of the Rolwaling people is restorative work on the historic Beding Gompa. Rolwaling has been known in Tibetan religious literature as a sacred hidden valley for 800 years now, and the Beding Gompa was built at the recommendation of Trulsig Rinpoche when he was still living in Ronbuk monastery in Tibet, before the Chinese arrived. The sacred books in the Gompa were carried by the Rolwaling people from the printing press in Shigatse, Tibet, in the 1950’s when the interior was painted by reknowned Sherpa painter Kappa Kalden, from Khumbu. It is these walls that are now in danger of collapse.

Unfortunately the villagers who built the outer stone walls fifty years ago did not put in a sufficient foundation and the outer stone walls are now leaning inward toward the interior wooden walls which were faced with a plaster made from local ingredients, including herbs and mud, and then painted upon. This fragile fresco style material is much more delicate than painting on simple wood would have been, but lends the paintings their depth and luster. If the outer walls collapse on the inner frescoed walls, they will be completely ruined, and since the original painter is dead and replacements very hard and expensive to locate, a unique form of art will be gone with them.

To deal with the Gompa problem, I donated the money necessary to pay for a Nepalese engineer experienced in restoration work to go to Rolwaling to survey the Gompa and make an initial appraisal and estimate of the cost for repair. This engineer will have a preliminary meeting with Broughton Coburn, American representative of the Himalyan Foundation established by Sir Edmund Hillary, as the Rolwaling community intends to make an formal application to the fund, while I will try to provide more money also. Chhiring Dorje, who is currently the vice president of the Summiters Club, is overseeing this effort and has written to me that the Club recently voted to send 20 different Kathmandu-dwelling Rolwaling men every spring, summer, and fall, to provide labor for the Gompa project until it is finished. The Summiters Club has also reregistered the Rolwaling Gompa as a historic site with the Nepalese government.

Health Clinic

The third project which Rolwaling people mentioned as important to them was some sort of health clinic. When I explained that the Nepalese government probably would not see it as cost effective for so few people when there already was a clinic in Simigaon, they requested a mobile team, training for a village health worker and further supplies of the type Seth Sicroff had donated several years before, which all of my informants agreed was very well administered by Ngawang Choklang. Currently, Pepper Etters, a former student of Seth’s who visited Rolwaling a few years ago, is applying for health grants and has contacted several interested sources. Anyone going to Rolwaling would be welcome to carry up basic medicines however, which are available over the counter in Kathmandu. Ngawang Choklang is said to read Nepali, English, and some Japanese.

School

Another project which the leaders of Rolwaling mentioned as important was the school. In every interview, I was told that it was to obtain education for their children, that Rolwaling people initially moved to Kathmandu. It is also a precondition of people returning to live in the village and the revitalization of the Rolwaling community. It was further pointed out to me that the widows of men who have died in mountaineering (now six from a population of approximately 350), would fare much better economically if they could live with their children in Rolwaling rather than Kathmandu. Needing to rely economically on their children in old age, these widows could not return until there was a good school. The fact that the trekking business to Rolwaling would soonincrease, providing more economic opportunities for teas shops and lodges, is taken for granted since the Summiters Club recently petitioned the Nepalese government to reopen Rolwaling to trekking tourism.

Fortunately, a new three room addition to the original Hillary sponsored schoolhouse has been built thanks to a Norwegian group led by the mountain climber Jon Gandal, who has been working through a Rolwaling Sherpa sirdar of his, named Dawa Chhiri. Unlike the old school, the new one will have a fuel-efficient stove so that it will be warm enough to attend during the winter. When I visited Dawa’s house in Kathmandu, I could personally observe a large blackboard and notebooks that he had assembled to be carried to Rolwaling as the finishing touch.

The larger problem is how to find adequate staffing for the school and a number of solutions are being debated, while a local Rolwaling woman who speaks and writes both Nepali and English, has been hired for the coming year. It was suggested that a couple would be more likely to stay in such a remote place and Dawa has instigated a pay scale which the Norwegians support, in which a sizeable and increasing bonus is given every year that the teacher stays and extends up to three years.

Electricity

John Gandal (whom I have yet to contact) and the Norwegian group are interested in putting in a run-of-the-river electricity scheme in Beding and have Ngawang Choklang making measurements of the river flow. It seems the Nepalese government, employing Milan Dahal, is also interested in such a project. Any such project should be coordinated with a retaining wall at the same time however. As for the Peltric set that Seth Sicroff investigated for the lower winter settlements, the Rolwaling people felt the Nepalese engineering firm’s estimate of $15,000 was too high and that the price will come down if the engineering firm involved believes that the Rolwaling community is paying for it rather than westerners.

Another aid group, which the villagers thought was Indian, sold many of them portable solar panels at the subsidized price of $40 each. The batteries on these were beginning to wear out after two years, so the replacement rate of the fluids necessary to renew the batteries, will be a good measure of how desired this input was. In this vein, the villagers reported moving their panels with them from the lower winter settlements, to Beding and then to Na, during their annual cycle, indicating that they did find one 40 watt bulb worth the trouble of carrying the panels up and down the valley. In regard to electricity and other inputs, the decision has been made by the Rolwaling Summiters Club to begin all development efforts in Beding and work outwards from there.

Summary

The Rolwaling people want to keep their community viable and are willing to utilize their own money and labor to work toward this goal. Many would like to retire there and all would like to be able to spend summers there. The older ones are of course, worried that it is unattractive to the young generation being educated in Kathmandu now, until major development takes place. Several of the more thoughtful Rolwalingpa even expressed to me that if major changes did not occur within the next five years, it would be too late to revitalize the community.

From my own point of view, the most important work at hand is to monitor Tsho Rolpa, and then to contain the river. What I personally can probably afford on my own however, with some help from the Himalayan Foundation, is repairs to the Gompa. There is an enormous reservoir of good will toward the Rolwaling people on the part of individual mountaineers who have worked with them over the years, and I believe money will be forthcoming on an individual basis. Tsho Rolpa and the river however, call for the involvement of international aid organizations.

In the meantime, I am happy to serve as the central point of communication among all the various groups who are interested or have plans to help Rowaling, as the last thing we need are overlapping or redundant projects. I have three separate letters requesting aid from the Rowling Summiteers Club, signed and sealed by two of its officers. One requests help with the Gompa, another the river containment, and the third, a mobile health clinic and health technician training. I will be happy to send a copy of any of these letters in PDF form to anyone who wishes to use them in applying for a grant. I also have the particulars of how to transfer money from overseas to the Himalayan Bank (routing numbers, swift codes etc.) where the Summiteers Club has their account as an officially recognized and licensed NGO. I have used this bank for money transfers in the past, with no problems. Any money retrieved from this account, can only be collected by two or more officers of the Summiters Club, accompanied by two witnesses. Finally, keep in mind that the spring climbing season begins in a couple of weeks, so I will have much more time to coordinate things than the Everest Summiters will until the end of the expedition season in June. I can be contacted at jturner@sunny-net.ne.jp

Meanwhile, my thanks to Seth Sicroff and Kumar Mainali for sponsoring this econference and enabling the issues of glacial hazards to be aired, and the various concerned parties to meet each other online.

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