Higher Ground

Rajendra Dawadi was running a school day like any other when a colleague told him the water was coming. A parent had just arrived to pull her child out. He did not wait for a second opinion. He stopped school on the spot and sent every student and staff member uphill.

The school was Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary in Bidur, in Nepal's Nuwakot district. It had 1,643 students. A glacial collapse high in the Himalayas had sent a wall of water down the Trishuli Valley in late August, taking homes, bridges and whole villages with it.

While the students climbed, Dawadi got on the phone. He told the bus drivers to stay away. One bus had already reached the school, and he turned it back. The bridge it would have crossed collapsed moments later.

At least 900 children walked away from that school alive. Two staff members are still missing. The building is gone.

Dawadi had been a student there before he was its principal. Watching it disappear, he said, "I have no words. I got education from that school. And I gave education at that school."

The floods killed more than 900 people across Nepal and China. Over 4,700 are still missing. In northern Nepal, 69 schools were destroyed outright, which means close to 19,000 students have no classroom to return to. Suvina Tamang, 14, made it out of Tribhuvan Trishuli that day. She says she plans to thank the man who got her up the hill.

We keep a lot of words in circulation about leadership. Vision. Influence. Presence. What Dawadi did was simpler and harder than any of that. He had partial information, no time, and 1,643 people who would do what he told them to do. He decided, and then he kept working the problem, because a decision is not finished until the last bus turns around.

That is the whole job. Not the title, not the plan on the wall. Whether anybody is safer because you were standing there.

Rotary works in places like the Trishuli Valley, and it works on the long slow parts, the water systems and the clinics and the schools that get rebuilt after. None of that happens without someone local who is willing to be the one who decides. Dawadi is who those partnerships are for.

He lost the school where he learned to read. He did not lose his students.

Source: WBAL-TV, wbaltv.com, https://www.wbaltv.com/article/principal-saved-900-children-before-his-school-was-washed-away-in-nepal/73580270