Rajendra Dadabi had 900 children halfway through class when the phone rang. A father from the village of Betrawati, upstream, alerted him that the water was rising incredibly fast. Dadabi, a 47-year-old headteacher and English teacher at the Tribhuvan Trishuli secondary school, in the Trishuli Valley, did not wait for confirmation or protocol: he took all the students to higher ground on foot, while the river began swallowing the road they had just left behind.
“I saw a bus crossing the bridge, but I couldn’t contact it. The water had already reached the school grounds. It was rising incredibly fast. The children were frightened, but fear gave them the energy to run uphill. What else could I do?”, recounted the teacher who saved 1.643 children.
