Bung Health Clinic
Project details
Sir Edmund Hillary built a health clinic in Bung, a Rai village in the Mahakulung area of Solukhumbu district, three days' walk from Khunde Hospital. The idea came from Uttar Kabir, a Rai man from Bung who had worked as Sir Ed's cook-boy on a 1982 expedition. Khunde's doctors initially advised against it, since Bung sat well outside the Sherpa communities the Trust normally worked with, but in April 1984 Sir Ed trekked to Bung himself, was warmly received, and agreed to build the clinic the following year.
By March 1985, Sir Ed, then New Zealand's High Commissioner to India, flew back to lay the clinic's foundations himself with his longtime sirdar Mingma Tsering. The first room went up so fast the roof was on within days. Uttar Kabir became one of the clinic's first two health workers, alongside a young woman named Chandra Kumari, whom Khunde doctor Keith Buswell called 'the most self-confident woman I have met in Nepal'. Kabir died in mysterious circumstances about four years later, and by the late 1990s the clinic had passed to local Nepali management under Dr Mingmar Gyelzen's team at Salleri.
The idea for a health clinic in Bung came from Uttar Kabir, a Rai man from the village who worked as Sir Edmund Hillary's cook-boy on a 1982 expedition. At the time, Bung sat well outside the Sherpa villages the Himalayan Trust normally worked in: three days' walk from Khunde Hospital, and home to Rai people rather than Sherpas. Jamie Uhrig and Penny Dawson, the Khunde doctors then running the Trust's health programme, wrote against building there, arguing the Trust should consolidate its work at Khunde rather than expand somewhere so remote.
Sir Ed changed his mind anyway. In April 1984 he trekked three days from Phaplu to Bung and was given such a rapturous reception, by the Trust's own history of the clinic, that he agreed to build a clinic the following year. He later explained the reversal in a letter: a local doctor, Mingmar Gyelzen, had become supportive, and Sir Ed had realised how large Bung's population was and how closely tied it was to the Khumbu people through the rice trade. 'I can hear you all saying "Bugger Hillary",' he admitted, before adding that he had 'really liked the people at Bung' and found them 'very hospitable and persuasive'.
By March 1985, Sir Ed had moved to Delhi as New Zealand's High Commissioner to India, one condition for taking the post being that he could keep visiting Solukhumbu. He flew to Phaplu and, days later, he and sirdar Mingma Tsering laid the clinic's foundations while Rai villagers gathered to watch. Building moved fast: within a couple of days of starting the first room, it was time to put on the roof. Carpenter Norm Gourdie and his partner Sari Lewis finished the remaining rooms after the monsoon. Uttar Kabir and a young woman, Chandra Kumari, whom Khunde doctor Keith Buswell called 'the most self-confident woman I have met in Nepal', trained six weeks at Khunde and became the clinic's first two health workers.
The story did not end happily for Kabir, who died in mysterious circumstances about four years later. Money and drugs caused tension through the early 1990s, with health workers accused of selling supplies for private profit, and one doctor's 1994 diary describes a punishing four-day walk and 133 patients seen in two days. Around 1998, as Nepal moved towards democracy, the clinic was formally handed to the government as Bung's sub-health post, with Dr Mingmar Gyelzen's Salleri team taking over day-to-day management around the same time, though the Trust kept helping fund its drugs.
The clinic still runs today as the Sir Edmund Hillary Memorial Health Clinic, now under the management of the Sir Edmund Hillary Memorial Museum and Elder Care Centre, and still supported with medical supplies each year by the Trust and the Sir Edmund Hillary Stiftung of Germany. In the three months before a 2023 funding request, it treated 637 patients for everyday conditions such as colds, gastritis and hypertension, and its community medical assistant, Kala Kulung, also runs regular health checks on elderly residents at the Care Centre next door.