Junbesi School
Project details
Junbesi School was established by the Himalayan Trust in 1964, three hours' walk above Phaplu in the Solu Valley on the trail to Kathmandu. It began with a single classroom for grades one to three, on land given by a local resident, and was later renamed Junbesi Secondary School as it grew. It remains a Himalayan Trust heritage school today, one of the earliest of the Trust's projects in the Solu region south of Khumbu.
Sir Edmund Hillary appointed a local Sherpa named Kazi as headmaster in 1970, and it was under his decade of leadership that the school grew into a full secondary school. Kazi doubled as the village's health worker, a role remembered by a Trust doctor who once stayed at his family's trekkers' lodge. The school weathered the 2015 earthquake and years of falling rolls as neighbouring villages opened their own secondary schools, and its enrolment is growing again today under a local headmaster, Chungba Chhiring Lama, in post since 2008.
The Himalayan Trust's own heritage record dates Junbesi School to 1964, but the school's own commissioned history, agreed by community workshop in 2019 and endorsed by both the Mayor of Solududhkunda Municipality and the CEO of Himalayan Trust Nepal, gives a different and more specific account: Sir Ed established the school in 1963, at the request of local people, under the name Moonlight Primary. The land was given by a local resident, Ang Nima Lama, and the first classes, grades one to three, were taught by headmaster Khadak Bahadur KC.
The school's real growth came under Kazi Sherpa, whom Sir Ed appointed headmaster in 1970. Under Kazi the school was upgraded to lower secondary and renamed, and by 1983 it had grown into a full secondary school, run for over a decade on funds Kazi found from private sources before government grants began in 1995. Kazi was also remembered, by at least one visiting Trust doctor, as the village's health worker as well as its teacher, and as host, with his wife Ang Chokpa, of one of Junbesi's trekking lodges.
Junbesi's headmasters were twice displaced by Nepal's political conflict, in 1999 and 2002, before Chungba Chhiring Lama, a local Junbesi teacher, took over in 2008 and remains headmaster today. In 2012 former students celebrated the school's Golden Jubilee and set up a Junbesi School Trust worth roughly Rs 21 lakh to help fund scholarship classes.
The 2015 earthquake badly damaged the school's buildings. The Himalayan Trust helped fund twelve new earthquake-resistant classrooms and two gender-friendly toilet blocks at a relocated secondary site, and enrolment, after years of decline as feeder villages built their own secondary schools, is growing again, up from 101 to 141 students on the latest count.