Page 85 - EarthHeroes

“Mr Norphel!” Chewang heard someone call his name. It was a smiling woman climbing up from the stream. On her back she was hauling a plastic barrel of water that she’d just filled. He recognised her from his previous visit. Since it was his last village stop of the day, Chewang agreed to join her for a cup of tea in her home. As they walked to her yellow mud-brick house, he looked out across the fields of the valley floor. They were brown and bare. It was May, and they should have been green with that year’s crop of barley. Looking upwards, he saw what he had feared: here, just as in other places he’d visited, the blue-grey glacier above the village had retreated higher up the mountainside.
Inside, as she boiled water for yak butter tea, the woman explained that the stream from the melting glacier had arrived late again that year. Her husband was out irrigating the fields, but she feared it was too late and their crop would fail. Normally peaceful neighbours had been squabbling over water, so they had asked a monk to come and perform a puja – or prayer ritual – to bring water to the village. But perhaps Mr Norphel could do something to help?
It was 1987, and 52-year-old civil engineer Chewang Norphel was visiting some of the 120 scattered villages in Ladakh to check on his projects. In over 20 years working here, he’d helped build almost every school, bridge and road in the region. With his neat hair and warm smile, he was a familiar figure whom everyone loved to see. Recently he had heard about the same problem everywhere he went: water shortages.
Ladakh, meaning ‘land of high passes’ in Tibetan, is an isolated region of northern India. Lying between the Himalayan and Karakorum mountain ranges, at over 3,000 metres above sea level, it is one of the highest inhabited places on Earth. Colourful prayer flags flutter above monasteries and gompa, Buddhist temples, dot the bare valley floor overlooked by jagged mountains. While few people live here, many tourists visit each year to enjoy the rich culture and trek in the spectacular scenery.
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