Himalayan schools dreams have David on cloud nine

David Woods loves that 187ft-long roof. It may be almost 10,000ft above sea level, but for the former pensions expert just the thought of it brings a smile to his face. It is, after all, the culmination of years of hard work and hope for the 32-year-old who has changed his life to build classrooms in the clouds.

High in the Himalayas of Nepal, but off the official Mount Everest tourist trail, is the small district of Sotang. It's a place where children are sent hundreds of miles away to attend school, if their parents can afford the flights and the fees. If not, there is a small local school which will educate them for a while and, after that, a life at home helping with the cattle, the farm and family.

At least that was the situation until David and the fellow trustees of his charity arrived. This Sunday, the Shree Bakhapalam Lower Elementary School and its eight classrooms will officially be declared open, offering a completely different future to the children of Sotang.

"I can't wait to get out there and see what it looks like," says David, from Loanhead. "I haven't been out there since November 2009 as things have been so busy with the charity at the UK end, where I can be most useful, but having seen the pictures I think it looks magnificent.

"When you think that the parents of the children who will attend actually helped build it, along with the local builders who have to shape the bricks from huge rock and then transport them to the site and everything else that goes on, it's been a remarkable project.

"There are around 1500 people in the region and around 310 children attend the school, but it doesn't include the vital years they need to sit their School Leaving Certificate. Without that, their prospects are poor."

It will be the second such project Classrooms in the Clouds has completed in the last two years in Nepal. Previously, it helped fund the building of two new classrooms on to the resident school in the town of Lukla, one of the stopping-off points for trekkers on their way to climb Everest. That included an IT lab - the first of its kind in the area - complete with 12 computers and the charity also funds two teachers at the school.

It's all a very long way from the playground of Paradykes Primary in Loanhead, or even the grounds of Lasswade High, where David was educated.

"We take schools and education so much for granted in the UK," he says. "It's only when you find somewhere where there are no schools but such a thirst for education, that it makes you realise how lucky we are with the system we have.

"People in Nepal desperately want their children to be educated, to go to school, and even though the teaching practices are perhaps 60 years behind ours - it's all about the teacher talking and writing on blackboards while the children listen and learn by rote - the children love going to school and want to get their School Leaving Certificate, which is Nepal's national qualification.

"Getting that makes the difference between being able to earn a relatively good wage, or living in poverty all their lives. The new school, and the classrooms we built at Lukla, mean that the children who attend will be able to do so up until year ten when they sit the certificate. Prior to that, the classes in Lukla stopped at year eight, while Sotang didn't have a school at all and the kids were sent away to boarding school in Kathmandu if the families could afford to do so. But the flight costs 130."

It was, unsurprisingly, a trek to Everest's base camp in 2005 which alerted David to the plight of Nepalese children and made him rethink his future in Edinburgh's finance industry.

"I was out there with my friend Ron, and we were raising 10,000 for the Thistle Foundation in Niddrie. I'd done fundraising for them before - a parachute jump, climbing Ben Nevis - and every year wanted to do something more challenging, so we opted for Everest.

"Our Sherpa, Dawa, opened our eyes to what life was like for people in Nepal and told us how far the money we were raising would go if it was spent there. It just made me want to do something to help.

"When I got home, life got in the way a bit, but then two of us from the trek, along with another guy I'd met on a motivational course, wanted to get started and it all snowballed from there. I realised after a while that raising money for this was what I really wanted to do, but I had to think hard about whether it really justified me packing in my job.

"Then I was left some money in 2008 when my gran died which allowed me to do that and go travelling. When I got back I knew I wanted to work on the charity full-time. Everyone in the sector is so nice and helpful, not like the financial world at all."

The first project was the Shree Lukla school. "There were six government-sponsored teachers but seven classes, each with 50 children in them, but the lack of a teacher meant that one class every day had no-one to teach them. It was ridiculous," he says. "We also gave them access to computers for the first time, so now adults are being trained on those as well."

However, as Lukla is one of the slightly better off villages, David is adamant that he wants future classrooms to be built in the higher, more remote areas.

He says: "Children have to walk hours, sometimes days, to get to a school and they are not always up to scratch. One we saw had a corrugated tin roof which basically just collapsed during the monsoon season, so there was no school for months.

"When children have to travel far they tend to stay there, so the schooling system breaks up families and in Nepal families tend to need everyone on hand to do the work required. As a result children don't get sent to school which is why illiteracy rates are at 55 per cent. These children have never had books, never been read a story.

"Taking education to the children helps them stay at home as well as give them a leg up in employability. It's scary what people get paid out there. Manual labourers for instance earn around 400 rupees a day, that's just 3 for back-breaking work. For those who have jobs working with tourists, they can be paid more, but that's why the School Leaving Certificate is so important. With that, people can get better jobs and that's something we may have to look at in future, how we help these children once they leave school."

Pensions are no longer on David's career ladder and the charity is now expanding. It has eight trustees, including Dawa the Sherpa, and last year David was awarded a Foundation for Social Improvement scholarship, which he says has put the charity on a firm footing.

"FSI has basically given me 20,000 worth of training, professional development and networking opportunities, which has made the charity possible," he says. "It's meant we can look at future strategies about what we want to do in Nepal and how we can target fundraising most effectively. I think we've got a really good story to tell and can show big changes for small sums of money. Last year we raised 30,000, this year we want to raise 60,000.

"We have to make sure that what we do is sustainable, however we have plans for more schools to branch out through the region."

Suddenly he laughs. "All I know is I'll be going to Nepal for the rest of my life. The people there are so happy, so appreciative, so keen to learn. Every holiday I have I go there. My girlfriend would rather go to a beach but instead ends up camping up a mountain, having to dig a hole to go the toilet.

"I can't wait to get there. The whole village will turn out for the school opening. It will be a fantastic moment."

For more information on the charity or to donate, visit www.classroomsintheclouds.org or call 07939 046254.