This is both a sad and beautiful documentary largely about the efforts of one man, Visma Raj Paudel, to provide refuge for the many orphans left by the on-going conflicts between the Maoist revolutionaries and the more progressive and educated elite.

Nepal: In the Mountain's Shadow

2009 | 48 minutes

Nepal is home to the Himalayan Mountains. For thousands of years people have traveled to the Himalayas seeking spiritual enlightenment, proclaiming man could be freed of all sin by merely gazing upon their peaks. This tradition is continued today by pilgrims who journey to Nepal across the globe to glimpse upon its natural beauty and explore its ancient history. But there's another side to Nepal. A side few travelers ever witness. Poverty-stricken slums and villages have become a common sight across the landscape.

The main role of the government of any country is to address the problems of the people and to find better solutions, but that's not happening in Nepal. The poor become poorer and poorer, and the rich become richer and richer, and there's a big gap... while the government isn't providing even the basic infrastructure to these poor people. Without further education most Nepalese are condemned to a life of manual labor earning an average income of $300 per year.

For decades Nepal's leaders have struggled to provide for their people. The situation escalated in the mid 1990s when civil war broke out across the country. And what started as a movement toward democracy ended in catastrophe. Over 12,000 people were killed in the conflict.

Many years later Visma Raj Paudel opened the first of the many projects to come... a children's orphanage. Refusing to give up on his dreams, Visma began seeking alternative means to help the people and children of Nepal. Today the orphanage is home to more than 70 children. It's no wonder that when Visma first began selecting children for the orphanage one of the first places he went back to was his childhood village.

To date the orphanage has received over 1,000 applications from communities open to provide children with a better life. Unable to adopt them all, Visma started the scholarship program. He's supporting only 200 children under his different projects, but it's very true that are so many children on the road and in the villages who are abandoned, not going to school, and forced to work as child servants.

Watch the full documentary now

Nepal: In the Mountain’s Shadow (Documentary)

Beautiful and occasionally sad documentary.

Nepal: In the Mountain’s Shadow

Published on Feb 5, 2014


"Nepal, in the Mountains Shadow" is a compelling cultural documentary set in the mystic country of Nepal. Guided by child rights activist and orphanage director Visma Raj Paudel, the film explores the growing social disparity that exists throughout the whole of the country, as he struggles to uncover the truth behind the plight of Nepal's most precious resource--its children. The documentary weaves together beautiful imagery and gripping first hand interviews to create a rare look into modern day Nepal.

Produced by: Maria Alexopoulus
2009 © Alexo Films Production
Distributed by High Banks Entertainment Ltd.

Documentary - Mustang: A Kingdom on the Edge

This 2011 documentary about the tiny Buddhist kingdom of Mustang is very cool and also sad - the Chinese have gutted Tibet and they have been encroaching into Nepal for a long while now, with Maoist rebels forcing themselves into government and the Nepalese culture.

 The documentary is a little more 47 minutes and was created by al Jazeera.

Mustang: A Kingdom on the Edge

While Tibetan Buddhism is squeezed inside of China’s borders, there is a place where it still survives intact: Upper Mustang – a once forbidden kingdom high in the Nepalese Himalayas.

Steve Chao travels there to document the fight to preserve an ancient culture, as China expands its influence into Nepal, and the modern world slowly creeps in.

There is a reason for China’s concern. In the 1960s, shortly after the Dalai Lama fled Tibet for India, a Tibetan resistance movement was formed in a place called Mustang.

Mustang, or Lo, as locals call it, is an ancient Tibetan kingdom that is now part of Nepal. Hidden in the Himalayas, the world’s highest mountain range, it is protected by its remoteness, and the fact the only way in and out for centuries was on horseback.

Seed - Nepal: Wireless in the Mountains

I liked this brief article from Seed Magazine on efforts to transform a small Nepalese village with WiFi and hydropower generated internet connections. Very cool what a few caring human beings can do for other human beings who just need a little assistance.

Nepal: Wireless in the Mountains

A home WiFi kit and a solar-powered relay station transform healthcare and education for a remote village in western Nepal.

by Gaia Vince

There is no road to Nangi. Reaching this remote mountain village in western Nepal involves a full day's hike up near vertical paths from the nearest town, Beni. I set off at first light with my guide, Mahabir Pun, a former teacher from Nangi, and it's not long before my pack is straining my shoulders and my legs are complaining. We see no other Westerners, just local people commuting up and down between villages, and traders carrying impossibly large baskets of oranges from the higher slopes to the markets below.

As we climb, stopping frequently to rest and admire the view while snacking on peanuts and sweet oranges, we chat in panting bursts. Mahabir, something of a celebrity in these parts, despite his grubby outfit and self-effacing manner, tells me about his lifelong quest to transform his tribe's villages through the unlikely medium of WiFi. Nangi village, home to around 800 people, has no telephone line or cell phone receptivity. Most of its residents are subsistence vegetable farmers, yak herders, and those who leave to seek their fortune as Gurkha soldiers. Mahabir first used a pen and paper in seventh grade, at age 13, and a textbook in eighth grade; he knew he wanted better for himself and for his village. It took two years of writing daily application letters to universities and institutes in America before he was finally accepted with full scholarship on a degree course at the University of Nebraska in Kearney.

"I knew I wanted to change things in our villages. I wanted to bring an income in and better education and medical facilities," he says. Twenty-odd years after arriving in America, he returned to Nangi with his dream and an equally important folio of contacts.

It is dusk and 2,500 meters higher up by the time we are greeted with the excited "Namaste! Namaste!" of children who present us with garlands of sweet-scented golden flowers and escort us the last few yards to Nangi village. I meet people by candlelight and share a tasty curry of homegrown vegetables before falling into exhausted sleep in the thatched roundhouse.

In the morning Mahabir leads me through the small village, past women grinding masala spices and kneading dough for chapatis on wood and stone, past a circle of community leaders and elders sitting cross-legged and deep in discussion on the cold ground, to the school. Our short walk is sprinkled with smiles and greetings — everyone is glad to see Mahabir. At the far side of a rectangular patch of mud that serves as the football pitch and general assembly area for the Pun tribe is a row of low, wooden school huts.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but this gleaming array of computers and monitors flanking both long walls is a pretty startling sight. Children, many barefoot, are hard at work, the only sound the clatter of keyboards. "You want to check your email?" Mahabir asks me, grinning at my surprise. At a school in London, these computer and internet facilities would be unusual — here, they are astonishing.

At the far end of a line of regular hardware, I spot something a little different — a couple of wooden boxes housing circuit boards. "Ah, these are the first computers that I built with recycled parts donated from old computers, because we couldn't afford new computers," Mahabir explains, adding that the village built a hydropower generator in the stream at the bottom of the village to power them. In 1997 Australian students donated the four adjacent computers, and people in the US and Europe sent over the rest in subsequent years.

With no telephone line, no way of funding a satellite phone link, and with the country in the grip of insurgency, Mahabir realized that to bring 21st-century communications facilities to his village, he would have to leapfrog the conventional technology route. In 2001 he wrote to a BBC radio show asking for help in using the recently developed home-WiFi technology to connect his village to the internet. Intrigued listeners emailed with advice and offers of assistance.

Backpacking volunteers from around the world smuggled in wireless equipment from the US and Britain after the Nepalese government banned its import and use during the insurgency, and suspicious Maoist rebels tried to destroy it. By 2003, with all the parts in place, Mahabir had linked Nangi to its nearest neighbour, Ramche, installed a solar-powered relay station (TV antennae fixed to a tall tree on a mountain peak) and from there sent the signal more than 20 kilometers away to Pokhara, which had a cable-optic connection to Kathmandu, the capital. Nangi was online.

Mahabir says he used a home WiFi kit from America that was recommended for use within a radius of 4 meters. "I emailed the company and told them that I had done 22 kilometers with it," he says. "I was hoping they might donate some equipment — but they didn't believe what I told them."

More than 40 other remote mountain villages (60,000 people) have now been networked and connected to the internet by Mahabir and his stream of enthusiastic volunteers, and many more are in the pipeline. The villagers are now able to communicate with people in other villages and even with their family members abroad by email and using VOIP (voice over internet protocol) phones, he says. Using the local VOIP system, they can talk for free within the village network.

As we embark on another full day's climb up to Relay No. 1 with spare parts to fix a broken component, Mahabir explains that email and phones are simply the means of achieving his goal of providing better education, health facilities, and an income to villagers. It's already working: Mahabir's "teleteaching" network allows the few good teachers in the region to train others and to provide direct instruction to students in any connected village school. Children surfing the net are learning about a whole world of opportunity outside of their isolated village. And Mahabir is developing an e-library of educational resources that will be free to use.

The technology has improved commerce, allowing yak farmers several days' walk away to talk to dealers and their families, and enabling people to sell everything from buffalo to homemade paper, jams, and honey. And the villages, many located on beautiful but little-visited trekking routes by the Annapurna range of mountains, are advertising their facilities for tourists. "We are setting up secure credit-card transaction facilities using the internet so that more tourists will come and provide an income stream to help finance the education and health projects," Mahabir says.

Telemedicine, via webcam, is now linking village clinics with a teaching hospital in Kathmandu. And nurses are getting trained in reproductive medicine and child care.

Mahabir, the one-man revolutionary, has still more plans to transform his village -including a yak crossbreeding farm in the mountains. He intends to cross the yaks, which can't live below 3,000 meters, with cows to produce a useful pack animal that is hardy, can live at lower elevations and also produces good milk. It hasn't been easy. The first 16 cows were lost to snow leopards; the yaks are now under more careful guard. Cattle are vital for the villagers because they produce dung that is used to fertilize the poor mountain soils, enabling their crops to grow.

But the cattle need food — ideally, something other than the villagers' crops. In another of his inspired projects, while all the villages around have been destroying their sparse forests for firewood, agricultural use, and building, Mahabir has fostered a substantial nursery from which he plants about 15,000 trees a year in Nangi, and more than 40,000 a year in the surrounding area. It provides the villagers with firewood and the cattle with fodder.

As Mahabir calls instructions to a guy at the top of a swaying tree who is working to fix the relay equipment, I realize that development in these remote rural villages need not be hostage to a failed government — all it takes is a true visionary with determination.

You can donate to Mahabir's project or find out about volunteer projects in the villages at: Nepalwireless.net.

Tags: Seed, Nepal, Wireless in the Mountains, internet, inspiration, culture, WiFi, Mahabir Pun, Nangi, BBC, hydropower generator

Film - Himalaya - l'enfance d'un chef

Himalaya is a beautiful film is set in the Himalaya Mountains of Nepal. The landscape and the traditional life of the people are as crucial to the film as the plot and characters.

Here is a plot summary from Rotten Tomatoes:

It is caravan time in Dolpo, high in the Himalayas of Nepal. The villagers must trek for days across the mountains with laden yaks to trade their salt for grain. But when Karma (Gurgon Kyap) returns to the village with the body of Lhakpa,... It is caravan time in Dolpo, high in the Himalayas of Nepal. The villagers must trek for days across the mountains with laden yaks to trade their salt for grain. But when Karma (Gurgon Kyap) returns to the village with the body of Lhakpa, leader of the caravan and son of the old chief Tinle (Thinlen Lhondup), the new chief blames Karma for the death, and will not allow him to lead in Lhakpa's place. Though Tinle's grandson, Tserin (Karma Wangiel), is far too young to lead the tribe, Tinle simply renames him Passang--a chief's name--and prepares him to lead the caravan. Karma challenges Tinle, threatening to take away the yaks, Lhakpa's widow Pema (Lhapka Tsamchoe), and Passang before the day that the caravan begins. Old Tinle in turn visits the monastery to gather his son, Norbou (Karma Tenzing Nyima Lama), a frescoe-painting monk, to join him on the caravan. But Norbou refuses to join his father, and Tinle returns to the village to discover that Karma has left early, taking most of the caravaneers with him. Tinle, Pema, Passang, the late-arriving Norbou, and the old men of the village leave on the scheduled day, and leading their own caravan in an effort to end the rivalry that threatens every resident of Dolpo.

The real friction in this movie is a clash of generations -- the old ways, based in astrology and oracles, and the new generation, whose "spokesperson" is a man of reason and does not believe in the oracles.

The conflict between Karma and Tinle is also familial, with reference to a previous conflict between the two families. One gets the sense as well that Karma is in love with Pema, the wife of his dead friend and Tinle's son.

The question in this film is whether or not the old ways hold up when confronted with reason. The answers are not simple, and the film deals with the subtlety of this issue quite well.

Here is the official trailer:



As a great companion film, I'd highly recommend The Saltmen of Tibet, a documentary about the annual pilgrimage for salt in Tibet, an essential nutrient for survival in the Plateau.

Tags: Film, Himalaya, l'enfance d'un chef, Buddhism, Nepal, salt, The Saltmen of Tibet

Vanity Fair - The Once and Future Kathmandu

Vanity Fair offers up a great article on the history and politics of Kathmandu, the secluded Himalayan kingdom that has long been an important buffer between China and India.

This is a fantastic look at the culture and attempts to preserve the culture -- and the photos make me wish I were there.

Bansagopal Temple, from the 17th century, in Kathmandu’s Durbar Square. Photographs by Robert Polidori.

The Once and Future Kathmandu

After a glorious efflorescence as the link between Hindu India and Buddhist China, Nepal was isolated from the world until 1950. The result: Kathmandu Valley, where a medieval past is vibrantly present, architectural marvels are part of everyday life, and the sacred is pervasive. Amid thousands of temples, pagodas, monasteries, and other hallowed structures, the author salutes preservation efforts to bring Nepal’s magic into a third millennium.

by Lucinda Lambton WEB EXCLUSIVE August 12, 2008

Where does the magic of the Kathmandu Valley come from? The answer, I think, is that there can be few other places in the world today that still march to the rhythm of medieval life; where literally thousands of sacred structures, including pagodas, temples, stupas, shrines, monasteries, votive pillars, fountains, and wells, as well as houses and palaces, all of them serving both God and man, are still vibrantly alive with their original cultural and spiritual significance.

Geography must take some of the credit. Nepal, lying between China and India—the “yam between two rocks,” as it has been called—was for centuries an important trading route between the two countries. With snow blocking the mountain passes to the north (negotiable only in summer on swaying rope bridges that made one Tibetan lama “tremble more than quicksilver”) and the threat of malaria in the jungles to the south in summer, all the traders, travelers, ambassadors, artisans, pilgrims, scholars, and students had to spend months in the three towns of the Kathmandu Valley—Kathmandu, Patan, and Bhaktapur—thereby creating the cauldron of culture, sophistication, and wealth which produced these architectural marvels.

Four ruling dynasties—the Licchavis, Mallas, Shahs, and Ranas—blazed the building trail from the fourth century onward, and today it is not uncommon to come upon a small Licchavi holy stone—a lingam dating from the 300s—covered with votive offerings and still playing a vital role in everyday life. There it is, deep in a rough hole in the road, showing how much the street level has risen since the fourth century.

Hinduism and Buddhism have coexisted here since earliest times in an atmosphere coursed through with a myriad of spirits, all subsumed into daily life. There is no division between the sacred and the profane; it is said that there are as many gods as there are people in the valley, and as many temples as there are dwellings; nearly every house has a shrine to the family god.

With a multitude of holy structures at every turn, amid a dense and ancient network of interlocking courtyards and narrow lanes filled with shops and workshops the size of broom cupboards, the sense of the medieval is palpable.

A detail of the Patan Royal Palace.

How could it be otherwise? It is an extraordinary story. Nepal was cut off from the rest of the world until 1950, when the first airplane arrived. With no influences from the outside world, the country’s traditions had remained the same for hundreds of years, progressing with a continuum of culture and craftsmanship that flourishes to this day.

In the 1970s architects, academics, town planners, preservationists, anthropologists, and historians from all over the world poured into this tiny valley. As their contemporaries worldwide banged the drum for soul-less modernism, Nepal represented a dream of safeguarding humanity from change. Earthquakes and neglect had taken their toll, but with craftsmen descended from generations of craftsmen before them, Nepalese restoration meant seamlessly perpetuating the traditional styles.

The movement to preserve the valley’s architectural wonders has gathered momentum ever since. In an act of astonishing bravura, in 1969, to celebrate the wedding of King Birendra, the German government backed the restoration of the Pujari Math, a Hindu priest’s house, and later undertook the restoration of more than 200 buildings in the town of Bhaktapur. In 1972, unesco began restoring the vast Hanuman Dhoka Royal Palace, in Kathmandu’s Durbar Square. There have subsequently been heroes aplenty, but here I must reserve my plaudits for the Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust, founded in 1991 by Harvard professor emeritus of architecture Eduard Sekler and American architect Erich Theophile, on whose heads I place glistening laurels; for, to date, the trust has saved, or helped to save, some 50 buildings. The most prominent supporter of the cause is Prince Charles, who helped launch K.V.P.T.’s plans for Patan’s Royal Palace complex by hosting a fund-raiser at Clarence House and making a donation from his personal trust. Restoration of the complex began in May of this year.

Krishna Mandir, a 17th-century temple in Patan’s Durbar Square, is the most revered stone monument in Nepal.

Go read the whole, very interesting article. In the meantime, here are the rest of the pictures from the article, which I think are just amazing.

Sundari Cok, a 17th-century courtyard of the Patan Royal Palace.

The Mahadev Temple, in Indra Cok, Kathmandu, rebuilt after the great earthquake of 1934.

A back lane outside of the Patan Durbar Square World Heritage site, where urban farmers still live in dilapidated buildings.

Lucinda Lambton is a writer, photographer, and broadcaster.

Along with Bhutan, Nepal is definitely one of the places I want to see before I die.

Tags: Vanity Fair, The Once and Future Kathmandu, Lucinda Lambton, Nepal, Photography, culture, China, India, Buddhism, Hinduism, temples, preservationists, anthropologists