MOUNTAIN2MOUNTAIN

      The Mountain2Mountain Initiative is a student-led and school-supported effort to raise funds for educational recovery in flood-affected regions of Nepal.

Our Nepalese students and alumni, working with student organizations, faculty and staff, will identify projects and partners in Nepal to deliver assistance in bringing schools in Nepal back to life.

Whether through school supplies, computers, infrastructure, or other, we aim to assure that all funds are being put to use to support education recovery in Nepal.

All contributions are tax deductible.

Our Mission

The Appalachian School of Law is situated in the Cumberland Mountains, in Grundy, Virginia in the heart of Appalachia. As described elsewhere on this page, the region has also experienced horrific flooding events over the years. The communities surrounding ASL know what it is like to experience life-changing flooding, and also know how people come together in such times to support those affected. We hope the Mountain2Mountain Initiative can serve as a pay-it-forward pathway, where those affected by floods in our Appalachian Mountains in the past can help those who are suffering the catastrophic impacts of flooding in the Himalayan Mountains now.

As an academic institution in a community and mountain region that have historically been shaped and affected by devastating floods, we want to focus our efforts on helping educational institutions in Nepal recover. Please help us to help the schools of Nepal.

    On August 26, 2026, a massive portion of a Himalayan glacier near the Nepal-China border broke away and began rumbling towards villages and valley below. It gathered enormous quantities of rock, earth, mud, and other debris as it descended. The resulting ice-and-rock avalanche generated a seismic signal equivalent to a magnitude 5.2 earthquake. As the avalanche smashed into the Tibetan valley, it unleashed a devastating surge of water, ice, mud, and rock into the river system below, causing a flooding catastrophe that is hard to even imagine. The resulting torrent raced into Nepal through the Bhote Koshi River and then into the Trishuli River, devastating communities along the way. The flood arrived with virtually no warning, sweeping through the settlement and destroying homes, businesses, roads, bridges, vehicles, and other infrastructure. Including schools.

The human toll of the Nepali flooding has been staggering. People in communities such as Timure were going about their ordinary morning activities when a wall of water and debris that we’ve only before seen in movies came racing down the valley. One eyewitness described the flood as a wave nearly 100 meters high sweeping through the market. As of the launch of this initiative in September 2026, more than 1,300 people have died in Nepal and neighboring Tibet, with thousands more still missing.

The disaster has affected communities across several districts and has left thousands of children without normal access to school. In the initial assessment, 20 schools in Rasuwa, Nuwakot, and Dhading were reported damaged; subsequent assessments have documented even broader disruption to education. The need is particularly acute in the Dhading district, where schools have been inundated with mud and debris, classrooms and educational materials have been damaged, and students and families have been displaced.

Aakrista Rhupaketi

(ASL Class of 2026)

For as long as I can remember, I have heard the older generation say it under their breath whenever something goes wrong in Nepal: "sati le sarapeko desh," meaning the land cursed by a sati.

Most Nepalis know the story, even if only in pieces. Centuries ago, during the reign of King Pratap Malla, a minister named Bhim Malla was one of the most trusted men in the kingdom. He opened trade routes to Tibet that brought enormous wealth home to Nepal, but he was executed on false charges. His wife, devastated, chose to become a sati, ending her life on his funeral pyre. Before she died, she cursed the land. That curse is where the phrase was born, and for years, Nepalis have repeated it every time tragedy strikes.

I used to think of it as just a saying, something my parents' generation said with a tired half-smile. That changed when I heard it again on the morning of August 26th, 2026.

There was no warning. There was no rain, no storm, nothing in the sky to suggest anything was wrong. High in the Himalayas, a section of glacier broke away and fell over a kilometer down the mountainside. Within minutes, the meltwater and debris slammed into the Trishuli valley as a wall of mud, rock, and ice that wiped entire villages off the map.

For people scrolling through the news or watching a clip on TikTok, this was a headline. For Nepali families, it was a phone call.

My mother got hers early that morning: relatives back home, unreachable, missing. My father found out a different way, watching footage of a place he recognized instantly because he grew up there. His village was gone. Not damaged, not changed. Gone, in the way that means it no longer appears on a map. My aunt lost nearly her entire family that day. Only her father survived. I don't know how to describe what it means to lose a home and the people in it on the same morning, with no warning and no time to say goodbye.

And here is the part that makes the grief harder to sit with: Nepal contributes a tiny fraction of global greenhouse gas emissions. Most people in the villages that were destroyed have never driven a car and never flown on a plane. Many have never even heard the term "carbon footprint." Yet it is their glaciers that are melting, their rivers that are rising without warning, and their children who are being buried under the consequences of a crisis they did not create. If there is a curse on Nepal, it is not the words of a grieving widow four centuries ago. It is a warming planet that punishes the people who did the least to cause it.

What I keep coming back to, though, is not the curse. It's my people.

In the days after the flood, police and ordinary villagers dug through mud with their bare hands, looking for survivors. Families who lost everything opened what little they had left to neighbors who lost more. A headteacher in Nuwakot got four separate warnings and used every second of it to move 900 children to safety before the water hit. Across the country, people who had nothing gave what they could to those who had even less. That is the Nepal I know: not a country waiting on a curse to lift, but a country that keeps standing back up, together, every single time.

Divya Ghorasain

(ASL Class of 2028)

Nepal has seen many disasters such as earthquakes, landslides, flood but the glacier outburst debris flood that happened in Nepal on August 26, 2026, has shaken me to my core, as Nepal has never had any calamity of this scale.

Thousands of miles away from my hometown, I first heard the news when I was in law school in Grundy, Virginia. Although my father and in-laws live far from the start of the flood, my first instinct was to check on them. After checking on them and knowing they were safe brought me a sense of relief. After that, I thought it must be another flood like every year where maybe only property got destroyed, and people were spared, but reality hit me real hard when I started watching news, videos, and live updates.

I personally experienced the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal, where we slept on the streets of our town for almost a month. I remember the fear even when there had been a warning. This is the one that gives me goosebumps immediately. We had buildings that we could sleep in, roads where the government could at least give us some relief if needed. But this one hit way differently when I think about it. In the blink of an eye, a whole community where people’s houses once stood, roads and bridges, markets in districts that stood there for generations was swallowed by the debris flood. The mere thought of the calamity frightens me to death since this calamity happened without any prior warning. There are no roads left now, and the community is so cut off that helicopters have to be used to provide them with food and even machinery for rescue and recovery purposes.

The flood started first in the Tibetan mountains, then flowed into the valley, hitting Rasuwa and then the neighboring districts. Among those districts lies Nuwakot. My dad works as an engineer for the Nepal Government, and he also served as district chief for the Irrigation Department of Nepal’s Nuwakot district. The district, which is currently hard-hit by the flood, also happens to be the same district where I spent a few summer breaks of my childhood.

My sister and I visited my dad’s office during our school breaks. We lived in a place called Trishuli, where the river brought many things to the banks. One morning, when our dad took us to the banks of the Trishuli River, we found skeletons and human remains. I was scared to see those, and I asked my dad whose remains they must have been, and my dad told us how the flood, time and again, swallows people in it, and it must be the remains of people who died in the flood. Even when I was a kid, I wondered how the family of that person might have felt knowing about their fate.

After this disaster, this memory recurred. The Trishuli River I used to know was around 298.6 feet wide; however, after the calamity, the width was reported to be 1014 feet. People have commented on the fact that people should not construct homes along the river, but many do not realize that they did not construct homes near the river, but the river came by their homes. When I let that fact sink in, it showed me the insanity of this disaster. Years of memories, family, property, loved ones, the whole community gone in the blink of an eye.

There is one particular story which I keep remembering. A father was crying in pain on the media, where he was saying how he sacrificed his whole life for his son to be an engineer is no longer with him. Thinking about his pain, I think about grieving for a son without ever likely getting his body back. This story made me feel so uncomfortable, and every problem I complain about became small in that moment. His grief is not a regular one, as this will be one without any closure.

This is just one out of many stories. Families are searching for their kids. Communities are waiting for any news. The survivors have lost their homes, pictures, documents, possessions, and even neighborhoods. This flood has also impacted animals, with dogs starting to go back to the rubble of the flood, waiting for their once-home and masters to come back to them, when no one is ever going to tell them that they will never be back.

In just one month, Nepal will celebrate its biggest Hindu festival, “Dashain”, where people come back home, but this time around, many families are left empty-handed without anything. Stats sound like just a number, but behind every stat is a person who is missing, a family who hopes to hear the telephone ring for their survival. The roads can be reconstructed, and the houses can also be reconstructed. But a parent cannot reconstruct his or her child, and a family cannot reconstruct the human being who will never come back home again. The human tragedy created by the flood is beyond anyone’s imagination.

I grew up in the capital city of Nepal, Kathmandu, “a city of a thousand temples”. I remember watching from my bedroom window and seeing snow-capped mountains. When I returned home in 2024, the same window gave me a different landscape experience, where I saw bare rocks on those mountains rather than the snow.

It is a strange contradiction, given everything Nepal does right. Nearly 40.36% of our land is forested; we lean heavily on renewable sources of energy such as hydroelectricity, and 76% of cars sold are electric vehicles. Despite contributing only 0.05% to global carbon emissions, Nepal stands on the front line of the climate crisis. Rising temperatures are melting the snow and glaciers of our mountains. Climate change does not recognize borders, and what is happening in Nepal at the moment just does not stop at Nepal’s border.

This debris flood, triggered by a glacier outburst, has swept away our homes that we once called ours, and markets that have stood in Nepal for generations. More than 1287 people are dead, and 5083 are reported to be missing. We need your help to rebuild not only what we lost but also to rebuild hope of a nation that has been shaken like never before.

P.S. Being born among the world’s highest mountains should be a blessing, not a sacrifice for a crisis created by the world.

Grisha Bhandari

(ASL Class of 2028)

As a little girl growing up in Nepal until the age of eight, I remember being mesmerized by the beauty of the country I called home. When I returned to my hometown at twenty two, that same beauty remained just as vivid as it had in my childhood memories. Seeing the devastation Nepal has now experienced is especially heartbreaking because, as UN Resident Coordinator for Nepal Lila Pieters Yahia has emphasized, Nepal has contributed very little to global greenhouse gas emissions, yet continues to endure profound human and economic consequences from a changing climate. “A country known around the world for its extraordinary natural beauty is now facing devastation and hardship whose effects may remain with its people for a lifetime.”

Some of my most vivid memories of Nepal come from traveling through the country and witnessing how families lived with so little. I remember seeing homes made of hay and other simple materials, with thin sheets of metal for roofs. Despite these hardships, the people I saw seemed happy. They worked hard for everything they had, and even then, I could see the strength and resilience of their communities.

Looking out the bus window as we passed through small towns and villages, I saw men and women carrying containers to collect water from nearby lakes and other natural sources. For some families, this was their only water. They carried it home to cook, bathe their children, wash, and care for their farms. Even getting water required significant effort, yet there was still a sense of happiness in the simplicity of their lives.

Today, that childhood memory carries a different meaning. It is heartbreaking to think that the same water these families once walked miles to collect, relying on it to survive, can now become the force that sweeps their lives away. A flood does not simply destroy a house. For families who cannot afford cement homes, it can erase years of sacrifice, memories, security, and hard work.

What affects me most is realizing how connected our lives are. Everyday decisions that seem insignificant can affect innocent people thousands of miles away. These communities have contributed little to climate change, yet they can lose everything because of its consequences. It reminds me that something ordinary in one person’s life can unknowingly contribute to the destruction of another person’s entire world.

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