A disaster day... Sunshine all day with mudslide at night.

Arrived on site to find all our lovely work covered in mud. 

Mud reached the main entrance to the school but didn’t overflow into the orchard apart from the paths. The only affected building was a toilet next to Singeyla House where mud and water entered waste chambers below the latrines. 

Konrad’s main task while at the school is the paving of some of the main thoroughfares. He spent the first few days familiarising himself with the site and finalising plans.

Angdus and Konrad went to Tanglangla pass area to look for slate suitable for the paving task. Tanglangla pass is located approximately 125km from Shey. They had to drive through extremely difficult terrain but located three suitable sources of slate. The next three days were spent collecting slate, loading it into trucks and taking it back to Shey. Suitable slate had to be selected from scattered material on the slope. Some of the slate pieces weigh between 80 to 100kg and need to be lifted by 6 to 8 men. 

Konrad wrote “Despite extremely hard work our team was in good spirits at the end of the first slate trip. I took part in slate collection as well. I must admit that Ladhaki and Nepali people are much more resistant to hard work at high altitude than we are. I had to take several ‘breathing breaks’ to cope with altitude. I have a lot of respect for what they did.”

 Back at the school work started on paving the main thoroughfare between the students’ hostels.

The upper terrace is almost completed leaving symmetrical beds on either side. One of the main tasks next year will be filling the spine planters with more plants like willows, grasses and flowers native to the region. 

GREEN MANURE

The trees in the orchard area are doing well. The alfalfa even though small has already provided a green appearance in front of the administration buildings. The sowings in the bare areas that can have access to water have germinated in a week, rest of the areas can be sown next spring when we will have the sprinkler system installed.The alfalfa which has been sown as a green manure, to be cut before flowering and mixed in the soil, has a slow growth like most other seedlings due to the cooler than normal temperatures this season. Leaving it to grow and flower is another alternative with which the staff would be happier. Perhaps in time it can be turned into a wild flower meadow.

Nepeta floccosa growing between the irrigation and domestic tanks, it formed a line where it can get a little bit of run-off water.

The wild chicory is blooming happily on the edge of the nursery beds and other dry areas.

COMPOST

The compost heap is developing fast with the kitchen waste coming in daily. In the last few weeks we had very little woody waste added in. So in order to maintain a good carbon to nitrogen ratio we added two wheelbarrows of sawdust to the heap, spreading it over. I tried to make sure that the staff understands that we need both the leafy soft vegetable waste and the carbon rich woody waste to achieve a balanced good quality compost.

We started the week with willow planting on the playground area. We planted the two tunnels; at the entrance and near the south wall.

SHELTERBELT

Planting of the first phase of the shelterbelt was completed this week. In the beginning of the week we connected the irrigation system for the shelterbelt area. We started irrigating one day before planting. Angdus arranged the JCB to dig the plants out from his field and went with Tsetan on the small truck to get them on Wednesday. Thanks to the JCB they were all lifted with adequate roots.

New Resident Landscape Architect Seniz Ocal arrived on 30^th March 2015 to continue work on the Dragon Garden.

One of Seniz’s first tasks was to plant the orchard with small apple and apricot trees which had been growing in the nursery. Here are some extracts from her weekly reports:

Our first trial was with manual digging. That was hard and slow despite the labour support. So it was going to be the JCB. The digging was finished by Friday evening. Saturday we moved on with the planting.

First we prepared a good mix of human waste manure, animal manure and compost in the nursery area to go inside the tree pits. We cut our stake ties out of old garments that we found in storage!

After getting stakes, compost and water ready in the area we went up to the nursery to lift up the trees that were going to be planted, working as a team of seven.

We picked the larger sized trees and the ones with no flower buds, also opening up space for the apples that are going to be planted. The trees in the nursery bays had grown good root mass in the three years they spent there.

The small truck was very handy for carrying the compost bags and the trees to the orchard area.

A total of 13 apple trees and 7 apricot trees were planted. First part of the orchard planting came to an end with the tying of the stakes and watering.

The next day we went ahead with tidying up the orchard. We sowed alfalfa and raked it in. We had plenty of seeds so we were easily able to sow the whole area.

GARDEN COMPETITION

We had our meeting with the vice president and the teaching staff on Monday and decided to officially start the garden competition on 25^th April. On Saturday I visited each class, talked about how to proceed and how they will be assessed with the students and teachers. Classes were given the judging criteria for reference. It was good to see the students interested and busy making their gardens.

Congratulations to all the students and staff on the 97% pass rate of the Year 10 2019 results.

Year 3 of the Seismic Upgrade & Mudslide Repair programme started in April 2019 and the construction teams worked through to mid-October, after which it is too cold for construction work.

This year saw refurbishment of the third residence, named Taklangla, out of the eight residential buildings to be done. The teams also completed the second of four new Eco-Shower buildings, plus the completion of the refurbishment of the two-storey Junior School building. The photos here are the Junior School building being completed and a ribbon-cutting ceremony when it was handed back to the school Principal for student use.

In 2018 the Seismic Upgrade & Mudslide Repair programme continued, working on the second of the eight residential buildings to be refurbished and one of the Junior School buildings.

This work might not sound very exciting to you, as you browse through the school website, but it will increase the resilience of the buildings in the event of an earthquake which is critical for the life-safety of the students and staff. The mudslide disaster was eight years ago, but the school is still recovering from this. Funding is needed for this long-term refurbishment programme.

Supplies of timber and insulation in the construction compound.

Work also started on the two-year task of the upgrade of the large two-storey 6-classroom Junior School building. The six classes of students were housed in temporary classroom spaces in Naropa Hall, at the top of the school site, that had been partitioned into classroom-sized spaces.

The panorama photo below shows the ground floor of the Junior School, gutted and with new timber supports being added first.

 At the end of the construction season in October, the new upper level was covered to protect it from the elements throughout the harsh 3-month winter. 

Repairs have begun in the playground with new seats fitted to the existing swing sets and more ordered and on their way.

I went through the plans for the playground with the volunteers from Cambridge and we discussed different options for getting involved in improvements to the space. Volunteers worked on my design for augmenting one of the structures with a cargo climbing net; fortunately the volunteer leader knew how to produce the net and so saved much time in trying to acquire a ready made one. The volunteers also assessed the existing climbing frame from top to bottom, put together by the same organisation in 2009, and spent much time making good and adding new features, including a second cargo net and tyre swing; both of which are very popular with pupils. The playground was given a thorough tidy up with all litter, extraneous items and large stones removed from the surface.

Designs for the entrance path and Outer Ring have been discussed and I am awaiting availability of the JCB and truck to take the river stones to the front of site so I can start setting out with the volunteers from Cambridge next week. I spent some time making logistical arrangements for the volunteers and developing a schedule of work for the them.

Whilst they still need a little work I was pleased with the progress and results from laying out paths to the entrance of the school.

The artichokes planted last year have borne fruit and whilst some have been left to seed we set up a temporary kitchen in the landscape office and cooked a number of them with Tsetan and Ritzen to try. They seemed happy with the results and before I knew it had a number others keen to try them too. A number of the artichokes were taken home by the staff so, who knows, it may be more likely to turn up on the local menu.

In the nursery we started to thin some of the higher undergrowth in the orchard beds; two weeks of hot weather coupled with steady water from irrigation and rain resulted in the Alfalfa and Artemisia beginning to compete with the trees for water. As water supply from the irrigation system is still most “challenging” in the nursery the Artemisia was removed and the Alfalfa more selectively thinned and lowered; the latter is nourishing the soil quite effectively and so worthy of selective retention. Other work included harvesting and replanting Coriander, which would appear to be indestructible, and planting on ornamentals from the nursery into the landscape; The beds for the secondary school were prepared and planted with Marigolds and Cosmos. The irrigation laterals were extended to include the bed and it is now covered by the irrigation schedule. The compost pile was also watered and turned and the smaller Alfalfa plants relocated from the nursery to supplement the beds in the landscape.

The site is generally really looking good with much of the planting of previous years, and earlier this year, coming into full bloom and shows the full potential of a well irrigated landscape.

At the weekend I was invited to the school picnic at site by the Indus, which is both idylic and a great example of what can be created to the front of the school with quality planting; I estimate that at mid-day the river combined with the planting lowered to the ambient tempreture by as much as 3-4 degrees so clearly something worth striving for.