Khunde Water Supply

Sir Edmund Hillary's biographer records that his 1963 school-building expedition, the same one that built schools at Thame and Pangboche and laid Khumjung's pipeline, also laid a water pipeline for Khunde. Khunde sits beside Khumjung on the slopes below Khumbila, the sacred mountain both villages' water came from, in the Khumbu region of Solukhumbu. Khunde's headman at the time, sardar Mingma Tsering, was one of Sir Ed's closest Sherpa companions, and the village became the site of Khunde Hospital three years later, in 1966.

A decade later, in the mid-1970s, UNICEF attempted a separate pipeline to carry water to Khunde and Khumjung across a few kilometres of exposed mountainside on Khumbila's western flank. A doctor working at Khunde Hospital at the time predicted it would take eighteen months to build and another eighteen before an avalanche destroyed it. Instead, the pipeline was swept away and abandoned within a year, far sooner than even his pessimistic prediction.