Namche School

Namche School was built during the Himalayan Trust's busy 1964 season in the Khumbu, the same year Sir Edmund Hillary's team put up the Dudh Kosi bridge and found the site that became the Lukla airstrip. The Trust's own heritage records name it the original school building in Namche Bazaar. It is now known as Himalaya Basic School, teaching children from early childhood through to grade five in the largest village in the Khumbu.

During a four-year literacy pilot at the school from 2016 to 2020, one parent, Yangee Sherpa, described a change wrought by something as small as a storybook: her son Pemba Tenzing, in grade two, began bringing one home to read together, something she said had never been part of family life before. The school's computer lab, like others in the valley, has since needed a solar backup after monsoon damage disrupted Thame's shared power supply.