Two images from the past fortnight refuse to leave me. The first is a head teacher's voice, cracking slightly on the phone, describing the ten minutes he had to get 900 children out of Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary School before the Trishuli river took it. Rajendra Dawadi received four calls at 9.10 in the morning. He told his older students to run for higher ground and turned the school buses around mid-route. Within minutes, the building was buried in mud. The second image is quieter: mothers in Galchhi, Dhading, sifting through sludge-covered benches for their children's schoolbags, notebooks and lunchboxes, one girl smiling when she finally finds hers in the pile.
One image is survival. The other is what comes after. Nepal has lived through the first. It is about to be tested on the second, and this is where I want to speak plainly to a government I know well.
The floods that tore through the Nepal-China border districts in late August have already claimed well over a thousand lives, with thousands still missing and roughly Rs 200 billion in estimated damage. Save the Children counts at least 69 schools destroyed or damaged, putting nearly 19,000 children's education at risk. The Ministry of Education has confirmed damage in Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading, the same three districts that lost classrooms in the 2015 earthquake.
I have watched this exact moment before. In the refugee camps of Macedonia during the Kosovo war, in tsunami-flattened villages in South East Asia, in conflict zones where I worked long before Kathmandu became home, the pattern never changed. Once families had food, water and a tarpaulin overhead, the next thing they asked for was not compensation or committees. It was school. In 1999, UNICEF pledged to get every primary-aged child in Kosovo back into a classroom by the start of the academic year, despite bombed-out buildings and landmines in the schoolyards, because, as the agency put it, restoring primary education would give children "a concrete sense of the possibility for a return to normalcy in their lives." That line has stayed with me for over two decades because it is exactly right. A school is not a building. It is a promise that ordinary life still exists.
This is not sentiment. It is evidence. After the 2004 tsunami, a quasi-randomised trial of a structured, school-based programme for Sri Lankan children found significant reductions in post-traumatic symptoms, depression and functional impairment, with no new cases of PTSD in the group that received it. A long-term study of tsunami survivors in Aceh found that disaster exposure depressed children's educational aspirations in the short run, but that effect faded over fifteen years wherever reconstruction was handled well, with family stability mattering more than the disaster itself. A 2024 systematic review spanning seventy years of child development research found that predictable routines act as a protective factor in precisely the high-risk environments disasters create. None of this is exotic. It confirms what any parent already senses: a child back at their desk, however temporary, is a child whose nervous system has somewhere to land.
Nepal does not need to invent a response from scratch. After the 2015 earthquake, the Centre for Education and Human Resource Development ran a "Back to School" initiative in these same districts. Its report is refreshingly specific: do not put a returning child straight back into a textbook, use games, drawing and storytelling first, give teachers psychosocial first-aid training, and, crucially, never turn a child away from the classroom door for missing a birth certificate, an exercise book or a uniform. That last point matters more than it sounds. A uniform is not fabric. For a child who has lost their home, wearing the same shirt as everyone else in the yard is one of the fastest routes back to feeling ordinary.
Which brings me to the cabinet now in office. Prime Minister Balen Shah is thirty-six and a father. His education minister, Sasmit Pokharel, is not yet thirty. This is, by some distance, the youngest and most parent-heavy council of ministers Nepal has had. I ask them to sit with that fact, not as a talking point about generational change, but as a lens. Imagine your own child's bag in that pile of mud in Galchhi. You would not wait for a two-month needs assessment before deciding your child belonged back in a classroom.
Nepal also has something few disaster-hit countries can claim: a genuine who's who of international and local NGOs already present and organised through the Education Cluster. My request to this cabinet is narrow and doable. Reactivate that cluster now, and give it one job only, to rebuild government schools with government books and government supplies, on a timeline measured in weeks, not the usual reconstruction calendar measured in years. Let UNICEF, Save the Children and the dozens of capable local organisations already on the ground do what they do best, fast, coordinated and in support of the state, not around it.
Every day a child spends without a desk is a day a parent cannot fully return to rebuilding their own life either. Give the children their blackboards back. The boardrooms can wait.
Dr Sunoor Verma is a surgeon turned global health strategist with three decades in the trenches of health diplomacy across Asia and beyond.