Musey Water Project
Project details
Musey is a small farming village a 45-minute walk from Lukla, off the main trekking route. Its water tank, built with UN funding around 35 years earlier, was destroyed in the 2015 earthquakes, and villagers spent years fetching water by hand from a distant source while they raised funds and built a stop-gap tank themselves. The Himalayan Trust helped complete the job, delivering two new reservoirs holding 45,000 litres between them in 2019.
The finished system, backed by a sand filter to guard against contamination and a fire hydrant that can throw water 30 metres down the main street, is run by a local water committee funded through monthly household payments. Committee chair Lhakpa Gelzen Sherpa's wife, Geeta Maya Sherpa, said the new supply let her expand her greenhouse garden from one room to four, with the surplus vegetables worth an expected two lakh rupees, about US$2,000, a year.
Before the 2015 earthquakes, Musey's roughly 270 residents relied on a 500-litre reservoir built with UN funding some 35 years earlier. The quakes destroyed it, and for years afterwards women in particular walked up to an hour a day to fetch water from the nearest source, while villagers built a small 1,000-litre through-flow tank themselves, just enough for drinking, cooking and washing, and started raising money for something bigger.
The rebuild follows a pattern already proven a few kilometres away at Lukla: villagers doing what they could first, then asking the Himalayan Trust to help finish the job. A speaker event in Hamilton, New Zealand raised $10,000 specifically for the project, and an internal budget re-forecast recorded around NZ$32,800 spent on it in the 2016-17 financial year alone, the same period the parallel REDSS schools rebuild was under way. The finished system, delivered with local partner Action For Nepal and completed in 2019, gave Musey two new concrete reservoirs holding 45,000 litres between them, a sand filter against contamination, and a fire hydrant able to throw water 30 metres down the main street.
Project committee chair Lhakpa Gelzen Sherpa also chairs the management committee at nearby Chaurikharka School, and his wife, Geeta Maya Sherpa, gave the completion report its closing word: with the new supply, she said, she had asked her husband to let her expand her greenhouse garden from one room to four, expecting to earn around two lakh rupees, roughly US$2,000, a year from the surplus vegetables. Khumbu Pasanglhamu Rural Municipality's mayor, Nima Dorjee Sherpa, thanked the Trust for its support to the region "since the 1960s." At the handover, Himalayan Trust New Zealand's then chair, Mike Gill, summed up why in one line: "Sir Edmund Hillary founded the Himalayan Trust in 1960, and, since then, the Himalayan Trust New Zealand has been working with partner organisations in Nepal to help the people of the Everest region to improve their health, education and general wellbeing."