Former Whitefish couple lead relief effort in Nepal

A former Whitefish couple who provide education and shelter for children in Nepal are now on the front line of earthquake relief efforts in the Kathmandu area.

Jerry and Judy Golphenee moved to Nepal in 1996, called to help the desperately poor people and especially the children. Jerry previously worked as a dentist in Whitefish. Since 1999 they’ve operated a nonprofit organization called Children of Kathmandu, which provides schooling, health care and shelter for children.

“Jerry is in Kathmandu and all of our students are accounted for,” Judy told the Daily Inter Lake on Friday from the nonprofit’s Bozeman office.

She was in Dubai on April 25 when the earthquake ravaged Nepal, and was scheduled to fly into Kathmandu the next morning. Instead, she returned to the organization’s Bozeman office to begin raising money for disaster relief.

Judy has been posting blog updates on the Children of Kathmandu website, sharing the fear and uncertainty of life now in Nepal. There have been more than 150 aftershocks, the latest a 5.7 magnitude tremor on Saturday afternoon.

“Jerry spends his days working with various Nepali friends to provide tarps, sleeping pads, medical supplies and food for the people of remote villages,” Judy wrote in her blogpost on Saturday. “Many, many villagers are now sleeping on sleeping pads and under very basic cover thanks to Jerry’s efforts.”

One of their students is from the village of Tipling, near the epicenter of the earthquake, where all 460 homes were destroyed and 567 people died.

“Children of Kathmandu has taken on the task of raising funds to rebuild this village,” she said. “Until such time as we are able to begin construction there, we are providing emergency aid to the residents of Tipling as well as to residents of other remote villages.”

Initially the surviving villagers received no aid from the outside because the weather prevented helicopters from landing and no rescue teams could reach the area.

Jerry was part of a team of relief workers who headed out last week with medical supplies, food, tarps and bedding.

“They made it there with the supplies,” Judy reported. “The men from the village met them at the trailhead. There have been so many landslides, the trail is severely damaged. Getting there and back was — and will remain — a challenge. ”

The cost of rebuilding a two-room home is $4,000 per home.

The Golphenees’ original goal was to rebuild as many homes as possible by mid-June when the monsoon season begins.

“That goal has proven unrealistic,” Judy said, because building supplies simply are not available.

Instead, they’ve been advised that the villagers in Tipling can adjust to a roof of plastic during the monsoon season.

“Even if we plan for building temporary houses then we won’t be able to get the necessary materials,” Judy said. “There is no way to carry such amounts of supplies up to the village as the way is destroyed by landslides.”

The new goal is to be ready for construction after the monsoon season, in mid-September, to proceed with rebuilding the village. Winters in the remote area, at 11,000 feet, are harsh, so the Golphenees are striving to build enough simple two-room structures to house two families per dwelling.

All totaled, more than 130,000 houses were destroyed in the earthquake throughout Nepal.

Judy said she’s spoken by phone with some of their students and can hear the fear in their voices. Others have emailed her when they can, detailing the aftermath.

“We are in terror all the time,” a student named Prem emailed. “We don’t feel safe to sleep at night.”

Four of the young men that Children of Kathmandu has educated have been working on a water purification project. One of the men emailed Judy over the weekend, saying “things are getting worse here.

“We are having bigger quakes and they are coming more frequently,” he wrote. “People are more worried and sad now... My family is staying under a tent in the field.”

Don Nelson of Whitefish, who leads trekking tours in Nepal, photographed the devastation following the earthquake and wrote about his experience on the Children of Kathmandu’s website. He detailed how he and a group of Nepali residents, including a 20-year-old student from Children of Kathmandu, drove north to one of the most heavily damaged areas.

“We drove three hours on moderately terrible roads to the home village area of Dinesh, to see for ourselves what damage is,” Nelson wrote. “The area is just south of the Helambu and Langtang Himal areas. We walked about two hours high above the roadway through the steep hillside terrace farms that encompass the village area, more of a smattering of individual farms than an actual village, photographing and doing interviews of the local people with the help of Dinesh and the other Nepali boys.

“I had wondered what was meant by the few people who have witnessed the real depth of destruction in the outlying areas and wondered about how much more damage there was compared to the Kathmandu area. Now I know.

“We arrived back in Kathmandu speechless and stunned by the vast devastation and the rising hopelessness and desperation of the survivors we spent the day with today,” Nelson continued. “I just finished a shower, trying to not only wash off the dust and sweat from a hot day climbing those incredibly steep mountain trails but trying to clean away the desperate feelings we experienced there.

“None of us will be forgetting this day.”

The Golphenees’ long relationship with the people of Nepal began not long after Jerry’s dental clinic in Whitefish burned down in 1992. They headed to Saudi Arabia, where he practiced dentistry for a couple of years before he saw an advertisement in a medical journal looking for a dentist in Nepal. In a 2003 Daily Inter Lake interview, Jerry recalled that ad verbatim: “Adventurous, fun-loving dentist who takes pride in quality work.”

Once they moved to Nepal they started asking themselves almost immediately what they could do to help.

“Until you live there, you can’t grasp the poverty in which these children live. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed. The needs of Nepal are so staggering,” Judy said in an earlier interview.

She thought it would be only a short-term proposition when they moved to Nepal, a country fraught with a corrupt government and years of civil war.

“I thought I had moved to the end of the earth, to Mars,” she said. “I wallowed in self-pity for a while, then I decided to feel sorry for the kids, not myself.”

Now in their 70s, the Golphenees continue to work tirelessly to improve the lives of children in the Kathmandu area.

Anyone wanting to donate to the Children of Kathmandu’s earthquake disaster fund can send donations to the Golphenees at 3801 Spruce Meadow Drive, Bozeman, MT 59718-1937.

Donations also may be made online at www.childrenofkathmandu.org. The website notes that administrative and fundraising overhead is kept at a minimum. Over the next four months, 100 percent of donations made will go to earthquake relief.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.