We are very pleased to announce that we have voted to help with the re-building of our second school, Sharada Secondary School! Sharada is in the village of Trisule, found in the Sankhuwasabha District in Kosi Zone of north-eastern Nepal. The school has a 453 students from Kindergarten up to grade 10 with 16 faculty members. Sharada is found in a very impoverished and rural area. This distance from the trekking tourism of Nepal means the region gets less exposure and has receives little to no support from other non-profits. The earthquakes irreparably damaged the two-storey building, and left cracks in the blocks of the other building. The region is also subject to seasonal extreme winds that has caused the other building to lose its roof numerous times. This has left them with not enough classrooms for the students.

The community got some funding of around 600,000 rupees (around 7200$CAD) and managed to get the design completed. They began construction of on 8-room building hoping they would get more funding but were unable to secure enough help to complete the work. A Member of Parliament (MP) for the area and the local mayor have now agreed to assist ABIN with completing the school. The MP will be contributing around $25,000, the local mayor around $12,500 and the community a further $7,000. This leaves $50,000 to come from ABIN. This project commences immediately and will take 12-14 months to complete. We will be doing a variety of fundraising events over the next few months to raise the money to help fulfill our funding commitment. You can always send us a donation directly using PayPal.

Here are some pictures of the Sharada Secondary School students, faculty and buildings taken by our Nepali project manager, Parshu.

Example of the failure of original construction/earthquake damage

School roof after winds

Roof after wind

School building after wind took roof

Building that survived but is unusable

Students lining before school

Beginning of new foundation

Yesterday Adam Kliewer, Regional Manager of BrockWhite Canada, presented a cheque for $5,000.00 to ABIN founder Rob Tournour for our newest project, Sharada Secondary School construction project in Sankhuwasava district of Nepal. We also received a $600 donation from Galaxy Motors here in Victoria. These generous donations will cover 10% of the cost to help rebuild the two-storey building.

More details about the new project in our next post.

Build is published annually by the Vancouver Island Construction Association (VICA). In the 2018 edition, an article about the work of ABIN appeared. Here’s a copy of the article for those who have not yet seen it.

If you’re using a small screen, you can get a more viewable version by clicking here.

Thank you to everyone who came out and participated in the ABIN 1st Annual Trail Run! It was a huge success, we had well over 100 runners completing the challenging 5k and 10k courses. With the beautiful weather and fantastic turnout we couldn’t have asked for a better first year. Between entry fees, generous donations, and ABIN merchandise sales we raised over $3500 which allows ABIN to provide brand new furniture for 2 classrooms Yagyamati Secondary School in Kathmandu. Yagyamati was partially destroyed in the earthquake, Nepal’s government managed to channel some funds for reconstruction of 6 classrooms. Rob visited the school in November, 2017, and found out that two of these classrooms were sitting empty with no furniture for the students.

The Prairie Inn Harriers support in all the logistics of the race was incredible, thank you so much to everyone who volunteered their time and especially to Bob Reid. We were so lucky to have mouthwatering Nepali food at the finishline donated by The Mint, and served by the lovely owner Rajen and his wife Nina who have been huge supporters of our cause and as Nepalis themselves they see the impact organizations like ours can have in their home country. Thanks also to 218 Run for their support and volunteer t-shirts, to Titanium Tents who supplied a tent for race day, and to The Market on Millstream and Thrifty Foods who donated post race snacks.

The race results are available here on the Prairie Inn Harriers website: 5k results – 10k results

Here are some of the photos from the day, we will also be posting more photos on our Facebook over the next week.