Page 86 - EarthHeroes

The region is a high-altitude desert, and temperatures in winter can fall below minus 20 degrees Celsius. It is even drier than the Sahara because it lies in the rain shadow of the Himalayas, which means that when air reaches this side of the mountains it has already lost its rain. Ladakh gets as little as 103 millimetres of rain a year and farmers depend on the water from melting mountain glaciers to grow their crops.
Glaciers are slow-moving rivers of ice formed high in the mountains. Layers
of snow build up over years and become compacted into ice until they are heavy enough to move gradually down the slopes. Each year in spring the lowest areas of the glaciers melt and run in streams to the valleys below. But global warming means that more of the ice is melting each year, so glaciers are shrinking up the mountainsides. Added to this, less snow is falling during the winter to renew them. Ice higher in the mountains melts later in the year as temperatures are cooler there, and for the farmers of Ladakh this meant that there was no water in March or April when they desperately needed it for their newly sown crops. The lack of fresh grass meant villagers were forced to send their goats and sheep into the mountains to graze, where they risked losing them to attacks by lynx and snow leopards. Many families had no choice but to leave the land that had been their home for generations. It broke Chewang’s heart to see people suffering. He had a strong Buddhist faith and believed our time on Earth is precious and should not be wasted. He wanted to use his time to help others.
Chewang was born in 1935 and grew up in a farming family in Leh, Ladakh’s biggest town. As a child he helped his parents at home and out in the fields after school. He loved maths and science, and would often scratch out sums in the dirt as he watched the goats. Chewang was inspired by his father’s cousin, who had studied in London before becoming Ladakh’s first engineer and building its airport and first roads.
But Chewang was the youngest of three brothers and because his family could not afford to send them all to school he was expected to join a monastery rather than go to secondary school. Instead, aged 10, Chewang ran away to Srinagar,
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