The monsoons started yesterday at 5am. I awoke to the familiar, but intense sound of rain on rooftops and pavement. Though the sound of the downpour was beautiful, my mind jumped to my missing luggage. With mud spraying up from the roadways and pond-sized puddles everywhere, a single pair of pants would not suffice. Without adequate drainage, the city becomes half-swamp until the sun shines again. So, after finishing the draft of our survey this afternoon, I stepped out to g

Thursday Bishnu and I sat down with the National Society for Earthquake Technology- Nepal’s (NSET) deputy director, Surya Acharya, pick schools to visit, without cherry-picking. We were tempted. Bishnu and NSET staff first vied for schools they remembered well and for government schools with the heaviest damage. It’s certainly easy to choose schools that make headlines. Schools wrought with spectacularly crumbled columns or entire floors pancaked into the thickness of an arm.

Bishnu and I are finally in Kathmandu. I arrived in the early morning just as school children, dressed in impossibly white uniforms, weaved through dusty streets on the way to school. The Ministry of Education officially reopened schools June 1st, but is having teachers focus on helping students cope with the disaster. Rather than traditional subjects of reading, writing, and arithmetic, students are playing games, drawing, and talking about their fears, which is impressively

With each conversation I have and report I read, the post-disaster school assessment kaleidoscope in Nepal seems unfold further. Dr. Rachel Davidson, of the University of Delaware, just returned from EERI’s Nepal earthquake reconnaissance mission. When we chatted, she mentioned how surprising it was to learn that most children in the Kathmandu Valley attended private schools. With little funding, and too few schools, the public schools are crowded and insufficient in meeting