Keene Professors Support Nepalese Earthquake Victims
It’s pretty obvious that the talent and thoughtfulness at Keene State has a positive influence on the local and larger community, as students regularly go off on community service trips and faculty design service-learning classes that give students real-world experience, sometimes far outside the classroom. But it’s surprising just how far KSC’s community engagement can reach. And right now, it’s engaged halfway around the world, helping earthquake victims in Nepal.
Professor of Education Len Fleischer was on sabbatical in Nepal on April 25, 2015, when the earthquake—the country’s largest natural disaster in 80 years—struck, killing over 9,000 people and injuring over 23,000. He was working with Kathmandu University to help establish a School Counseling Master’s program (and perhaps an academic/internship exchange with KSC) and conducting workshops and seminars on lifespan development, school counseling, and social-emotional learning.
In the spring of 2014, Environmental Studies Professor Renate Gebauer and Education Professor Tom Bassarear took a group of honors students to Nepal for two weeks as part of a Global Engagement course. From previous visits, including a hitch in the Peace Corps 20 years ago, they had many connections to local people and organizations.
Nepal, among the poorest countries on earth, needed help, and Drs. Fleischer, Gebauer, and Bassarear stepped up to do what they could. Dr. Gebauer started raising money and collected approximately $6,500 from the Keene State community, from friends and family in her native Germany, and from a Zen monastery she attends. She returned to Nepal and stayed at the Kevin Rohan Memorial Eco-Foundation (KRMEF) a sustainable community near Kathmandu where she and the students from the Global Engagement class stayed in 2014. KRMEF has been providing a range of support for the surrounding community after the earthquake, and Dr. Gebauer worked with them to build temporary shelters for those who lost their homes. With the money she raised, she was able to deliver 90 small solar panels to one village in a remote mountain area and two larger panels to a monastery in nearby villages that suffered much devastation. The villagers have been living in tents without electricity for two months, and the solar panels enable them to have lights and charge cell phones, which gives them critical communication with the outside world. The solar panels also provide a long-term solution, since the villagers often lose power during the monsoon season.
“Why am I am doing this?” Dr. Gebauer mused. “Maybe the most important reason was that my heart told me to go. I love the Nepali people—they are generous, friendly, humble, and very hospitable. And I’ve discovered that I’m getting so much back from them. I feel lucky that I was in the position to come.”
After Dr. Fleischer returned to Keene from his sabbatical, the people and organizations with whom he’d connected in Nepal asked him for help, so he flew back to Nepal on June 17 and worked with the Chetanalaya Institute for Humanity, Peace, and Spirituality, ProPeace – Projects for Poverty Eradication and Community Empowerment, and the Little Sisters Fund (which works with vulnerable young girls), doing a variety of individual and group counseling, visiting temporary learning centers and schools, working in “trauma relief camps” in the tent encampments, and training teachers and administrators in sustainable resilience.
“It has been a joy to work with my Nepali partners and with the Nepali people,” Dr. Fleischer explained. “The resilience and the courage is extraordinary. As Renate noted, we are in a different phase now, and the energy and commitment, especially of young people here, for the recovery process and for their culture is really quite something.”
And the work is far from finished. Dr. Fleischer was back in Keene on July 19 for a very successful fundraising event at a packed Colonial Theater. The centerpiece of the evening was the film When the Iron Bird Flies: Tibetan Buddhism Arrives in the West. Three Tibetans from Nepal, Tashi, Jhamba, and Thupten Sherpa, were also on hand to talk about efforts to help in Kathmandu after the earthquake. Jhamba lived with the Fleischers in the early ’90s, while taking courses at KSC in preparation for nursing school. Westmoreland’s own Brittany Santacroce introduced the video of her original song, “Brick by Brick,” which she composed by for the people of Nepal.
