Local Resident Shares Experience of Trekking and Teaching in the Himalayas at St. Helens Public Library

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 31, 2018

St. Helens, Ore. – Columbia County resident Rosemary Jeffrey will give a talk at St. Helens Public Library on her decade of experience traveling and teaching in the Himalayas of Nepal. Her presentation, Trekking and Teaching in the Himalayas, will be held on Tuesday, October 2 at 7 p.m. in the Columbia Center Auditorium, 375 S. 18th Street, St. Helens.

Since reading about the Himalayas in National Geographic magazines as a young person, Jeffrey always dreamed of summiting Mount Everest. However, she never found the right timing to fulfill her dream.

Then, at age 60, Jeffrey went to hear renowned American mountaineer Arlene Blum speak and learned that Blum had space available on an upcoming Himalayan tour that she was offering. Jeffrey jumped at the opportunity to travel to the Himalayas. While she didn’t fulfill her childhood dream to summit Mount Everest, Jeffrey trekked through the Himalayas for the first time in 2008 with a group of 20 other people.

While on the tour, one of the local guides learned that Jeffrey was a teacher from the United States and asked her to come help at his village’s school. She agreed, and in 2010, she returned to the Himalayas to trek to a remote village with school supplies. This was the first of seven trips that Jeffrey would end up taking to the village over the next eight years.

Each visit involves a plane trip from Kathmandu to the Lukla Airport, known as the world’s most dangerous airport because of its very short runway, high elevation, turbulence, and a runway that abuts a 2,000-foot drop on one side and a solid stone wall on the other. From Lukla, Jeffrey must pack her gear and school supplies and make a two-day trek on foot along a donkey train trail to the village. The trail is slow going and must be made by foot because of the extreme elevation gains and losses, rocky terrain, and mud that Jeffrey has sometimes found herself up to her thighs in.

Despite the difficulty in reaching the village, Jeffrey finds her visits worth the hardship of travel because of the village children. Due to its remote and challenging location, children in the village had never seen a wheel or used electricity. In her seven trips to the village, Jeffrey has helped bring opportunities to the village school that have been transformative. She has helped increase the number of schooling years for children beyond the five years of funding provided by the government, brought school supplies and curriculum written in the village’s Himalayan language, provided solar chargers and tablets with downloaded curriculum for the local teachers to use, brought handheld microscopes for the kids, helped teach English, and provided assistance with a women’s farm co-op and leadership group that helps teach kids the skills needed to find jobs in the city.

Jeffrey returned from her most recent trip to the village in March 2018.

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For further information regarding the Himalayan talk at St. Helens Public Library, please contact Library Director Margaret Jeffries at margaretj@ci.st-helens.or.us or Communications Officer Crystal Farnsworth at crystalf@ci.st-helens.or.us or 971-757-0103.