Khunde Hospital
Project details
Khunde Hospital was the first hospital established by Sir Edmund Hillary's Himalayan Trust. Built in 1966 in the Khumbu region at the foot of Mount Everest, it was set up at Khunde, the home village of Mingma Tsering, who served as Ed Hillary's sirdar from 1963.
The hospital was staffed by volunteer doctor couples from New Zealand and Canada, each working a two-year posting. In October 2002 it was handed over to Sherpa management under Dr Kami Temba.
The hospital at Khunde has its roots in 1963. Sir Edmund Hillary's school-building expedition found a smallpox outbreak spreading through the district. He radioed the army checkpost at Namche for an emergency vaccine airdrop, and within a week more than 3,000 people had been vaccinated. Sir Ed wrote afterwards that the vaccinations were the most widely appreciated of everything the expedition did, and the experience pushed him toward building a permanent hospital.
Louise Hillary spent a year raising the money, giving up to five talks a day around New Zealand, and 40 Auckland Lions Clubs raised 30,000 pounds of it. The hospital opened on 18 December 1966.
The iodine programme run out of Khunde all but ended iodine deficiency in the Khumbu.
Kami Temba grew up below Thame. His father died before he was born, and he walked five hours each way to attend Khumjung School once Thame's own school ran out at Class 4. He won Himalayan Trust scholarships after Class 7, worked as a Thame teacher, then a village health worker, then a Khunde Hospital assistant for close to twenty years. A Trust scholarship to Fiji's medical school let him qualify as a doctor in 2000, and he returned to Khunde in 2002 as its doctor in charge.
Dr Kami Temba is the first Nepali doctor-in-charge at Khunde. Khunde's doctors also back up the health workers at the Thame and Phortse clinics through case discussions, supply runs and video consultations.