IMPROVING EDUCATION IN THE MOUNTAINS OF NEPAL

Wangdowa Sherpa was born in the southwestern foothills of Mount Everest in eastern Nepal

Wangdowa is the founder and director of Sherpa Travel, Inc. His service business specializes in ecotourism that both explores and contributes to conserving nature and culture.  As Director, he plans environment friendly leisure and adventure tours, eco-tours, treks, and expeditions in the Himalayas.  Through trips he connects people to his village  and the traditional lifestyles and culture of the Sherpa people.  Wangdowa currently lives in Lee Vining in the Eastern Sierra with his wife Deanna Dulen. He works seasonally as work opportunities arise is a trip leader, cook and a landscaper.

In fall 2011, he led 17 trip members mostly from the Eastern Sierra to his village in Nepal.  The group saw the needs of a good school to provide quality education and health care needs in his village Phapre in Okhaldunga District in East Nepal.  Upon our return, the group established Friends of Himalayan Sherpa People, Inc., a 501c3 nonprofit organization (granted in December 2013 by IRS).  Through FHSP and other donors and volunteers, they  have raised funds, bought the land, registered Pikey Phapre Primary School,  and now have built a five classroom school (work still in progress finishing interior of the school), and inaugurated in April 2014 with group of Eastern Sierra supporters.  The Friends of Himalayan Sherpa people goals for the next 1-2 years are to improve the quality of the education for the young students by hiring a professional teacher and principal, and to improve the health of the children at school by providing wood stoves that vent outdoors preventing them from inhaling smoke and the wide variety of health and respiratory problems and also keeping them warm in the rain of the monsoon and cold of the winter.

Wangdowa has broad cross cultural experience acquired through schooling in Nepal, India, Australia, and the United States. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Studies from California State University East Bay. He speaks Nepali, English, Sherpa, Hindi and some Tibetan. In the spring of 1988, he participated with the China-Japan-Nepal Friendship Expedition team to Mount Everest from the South-face, climbed up to 27,000 ft. (2,000 ft. below the summit) and spent 16 days between the elevations of 19,520 ft. (Camp 1) and 27,000 ft. (above Camp 4).