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LEARNING TO SPEAK ENGLISH IN SHANGRI-LA

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Contributed by: Dave Hughes on 10/3/2007

LEARNING TO SPEAK ENGLISH IN SHANGRI-LA

Well, not exactly in mythical Shangri-La - but in a Real Place mighty close to the where the inspiration came from for the 1933 classic book and movie "Lost Horizon"

Complete with a hidden valley in the remote and forbidding Himalayas, an ancient Buddhist Monastery, and a friendly, gentle people speaking a foreign tongue whom westerners only recently have gotten to know.

For as I described in Part II of this tale of Wireless on Everest, and then in Namche the Sherpa Tsering who lives at 15,000 feet there, asked me whether I could help him use my wireless magic to teach oral English to young Sherpas who live off the beaten track of well heeled Westerner climbers and trekkers. For as he described the situation to me, unless Sherpa youngsters learn oral English, they are doomed the rest of their lives to either just scratch out a subsistence potato living on the harsh slopes between forbidding Chinese-occupied Tibet, and the more fertile low lands of Hindu Nepal and India. Or just carry heavy loads for Westerners at $5.00 a day.

If they learn English they can at least become mountain Guides, then perhaps get an education in Kathmandu, and start making a living like Tsering does from providing modern goods and services to Westerners who trek up and down the narrow corridor of the Solo Khumba. They can't afford to go to the private schools in Kathmandu, as the children of Sherpas who make more money running the lodges in that corridor do, and which gave even Tsering his start in life outside the mountain fastness. And the Nepalese government school teachers don't know English. They have enough to do to live in Sherpa villages high up, and teach reading and writing Nepalese.

And it takes so much energy for Westerners to trek up and down just the heavily traveled corridor between Mt Everest and the lowlands, they never see or contact, much less hire Sherpa families or their children who live only 5 miles east or west of that corridor. One does not wander around those hills. Everything is a planned expedition, staying in Sherpa owned lodges, guided by savy English or other European language speaking Sherpas who themselves hire poorer Sherpa 'porters' to carry the loads. Those off the beaten path live economically back in the potato farming times in the 1800s before masochistic Brits popularized trying to climb the highest mountains in the world. Or at least see them up close and personal.

So how can we help the youngsters of Thame, Nepal, 5 miles away from Namche, learn oral English?

I scratched my head, and came up with a solution.

First of all I tracked down a Sherpa who grew up in Namche, got his start by his lodge-owning parents able to send him to Kathmandu, get an education, was computer savy enough to end up coming to American to work, get a degree, in Pittsburgh, as a computer programmer. And of course he knows Sherpa - a variant of Tibetan, Nepalese, and English, spoken and written. And of course is on the Internet from both his work and home. He knew tech, the Internet, his native culture, and home - Namche.

I knew that 'oral' had to be communicated - taught and learned - via Voice over IP, VOIP technology. Which can travel over the Internet. Ordinary dial up telephone would not do. For there are no telephones in Namche or Thame. No cell phones either. Secondly, if even if there were, it would cost huge amounts, at international rates.

So if we could link the students in a school in Thame, about 4 miles from Namche, where the satellite base connected to the Internet, by unlicensed Wireless across that 4-5 miles, then the students could be connected directly to the Internet. Which would go up to the 22,000 mile high satellite bird, then down into an Internet service in Kathmandu, Worldlink.Then that Satellite Internet service with its very large antennas with substantial bandwidth, would go up and down into Hawaii (there were no Internet cable lines into Nepal). And then the signal would reach the Continental United States via undersea cable from Hawaii. And thence to Mingma Sherpa in Pittsburgh over the terrestrial Internet.

It would require either an IP capable VOIP device - telephone - at both ends, or computers at both ends with VOIP capabilities which could then link Mingma Sherpa's mouth to the kids ears in Thame, and vice versa. They would just have to get used to the latency 'delays' of voice by geosynchronous satellite - up to a second and a half each hop. But one learns how to speak, listen, as his voice gets there into the ear around the world, the other guy hears, composes his answer, and speaks, his voice taking a delay to get back. As much as 3 to 5 seconds. (all you readers are used to that on CNN when it takes so long for the newsanchor's voice here in the US to reach Iraq, and the answer to get back - either voice only or video. Television can't bribe the Laws of Physics to go faster! The speed of light is.....

At least that was the theory. Now for the practical implementation.

I called my favorite Cisco again, and begged for a gift of four Cisco VOIP telephone sets, which could be tapped off any Internet VOIP circuit. They use SIP (session initiation protocol) a public voip standard. They knew I would do things extraordinary with them, and they might again, be a beneficiary of the publicity I got them in 2003 when I showed Tsering how to install the worlds highest Cybercafe. So they shipped four of them to me.

I first tested a pair of them between my house and my office - wirelessly of course. They worked and I figured out how to configure them. I also knew that SIP requires 64kbps of bandwidth, which might be hard to get over the low bandwidth satellite IP feed into and out of Nepal.

So I took packed two of them with me on my airline trip to Nepal and then trek trip up to Namche. I put them in the same footlocker sized case I carried the Wi-Fi radios I was donating to Namche and Tsering. Which Sherpa porters, at $5 a day would carry on their backs from Lukla, where the small prop Yeti Airlines plane would land, three hard trekking days away from Namche.

But Jim Forster, that Distinguished Engineer at Cisco had a generous additional idea. He, personally, would donate a $2,000 laptop computer to the Sherpa school in Thame they would need for email and web browsing. Voice would not be enough by itself. I took him up on that offer..

So then came my November 2004 trip to Mt Everest country. I won't bore you with the trekking and climbing details (though there was plenty to remember, such as landing on a tiny airstrip with a 15% upslope bang into a mountain wall, and departing by plunging over a the edge of a canyon as deep as the Grand Canyon; crossing the swinging bridges high above gorges and roaring fish-less rivers, Yaks passing us by on the trail with their wide horns a danger, or Sherpas carrying huge loads to 'market' at Namche.)

Suffice it to say I was able to trek to Namche, install the first radios, while Tsering and his assistant watched and learned from me. And then I made he and his assistant install the second one while I critiqued. Then I had to put a relay radio, solar powered with a 12 volt battery high up on a shelf that could talk to the radio down at his Cybercafe and its Satellite base and dish, tested it all the way back to my server in Colorado, and also 4 miles across ridges toward Thame.

BUT there was no way to reach, line of sight, from the satellite base location in Namche to the school building in Thame. Both were low in folds in the ground. There had to be another relay point - but where it would also be accessible for trouble shooting.

So Tsering took off over the trail toward Thame, for he had a hunch he could put a radio relay where I would never have been able to get permission to. He clambered up to the ancient, very conservative, Buddhist Monastery 'Gompa Thame' clinging to the side of a mountain (Shangri-la?) which also, from a small hydroelectric plant below on a river running through Thame, constructed by Austrians a decade before, had grid power for their lights! Tsering, a good Buddhist, asked the Monks if he could hang the relay radio on their walls so it could 'see' the other radio 4 miles away, and Thame school down below. They said yes to both! And no, they didn't want to be connected to the Internet themselves. (conservative, got it?)

So he installed that, and then put the last radio down at the school, set up the laptop for them, and had learned enough by now to connect up both the Ethernet to the computer and to the Cisco Voip IP phone, and put two fixed IP numbers into them from his satellite internet router.

We tested it, pinging, end to end and it worked! From Thame to Pittsburgh! And we tested the Cisco VOIP phone between Thame and Namche. It also worked.

So the third Cisco VOIP phone was with Tsering in Namche, and the fourth in Thame at the school.

The job was half done.

When I got back to Colorado, I waited for Mingma who was was going to visit some of his countrymen in Colorado from Pittsburg on Christmas break (you would be surprised how many Sherpas live and work in the Colorado Rockies. They are used to, and like, our Mountains! They even go skiing!!!! Talk about a busman's holiday!) So he visited me around Christmas in Old Colorado City also. A month after I got back from Nepal.

And I handed him the last SIP phone, and while he was near my server, he was able to talk to Tsering in Namche. He talked to some kids in Nepal up at 15,000 feet, babbling away in Nepalese by VOIP.

So he went back to Pittsburgh and, via email, first in Nepalese (he had to download the Nepalese character font to his Windows machine and get it downloaded to the laptop in Thame, so he could tell the Nepalese teacher what he should be doing, in writing first ) then in beginning English start teaching the kids.

It was a halting process. I couldn't follow everything - after all I do not speak Nepalese! But the REALLY Distant Learning effort was started.

Then a problem arose. Tsering has to pay for his satellite bandwidth. In between climbing and trekking seasons (there are just two seasons a year) when he has lots of business from trekkers wanting to contact home, he could afford a bidirectional 128kbps feed. But OFF season he had to drop it, and thus his costs, to 64Kbps. From about $1,500 a month, to about $750. But SIP protocol VOIP, takes ALL 64kbps to function properly! If ANY other traffic is on the link to or from the satellite transponder at the same time, the voice quality drops to unintelligible or dead.

Ta. Da! So I intervened and told Tsering and Mingma, to download free Skype, which could use a computer's microphone and speaker! And will support voice over IP cursuites as low as 32kbps and lower! HALF the bandwidth of SIP based VOIP (which most companies, including Vonage use!)

And told him to hustle over to Thame (Sherpas can do that. Westerners would SLOWLY walk over there, taking 3 or more times as long) and help them start using free, superior quality, lower bandwidth, and added feature Skype)

So the final problem was solved.

Thanks, Monks of Gompa Thame! Shangri-La indeed!

You can follow the above and other comments and pictures about Distance Learning for the Sherpas of Nepal at

http://gallery.linkingeverest.com/main.php?g2_itemId=7135

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Dave Hughes

Colorado Springs , CO

Dave Hughes has posted 78 stories and 87 comments since joining on 3/1/2007. Dave Hughes 's average story rating is 4.9.

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