A school in Nepal built in memory of intrepid climber Ginette Harrison, the only woman to climb Mt Kanchenjunga and the 30th woman to summit Mt Everest, is threatened with closure as Maoists want it shifted.
The Ginette Harrison School, started in 2001 in Ravi, a poor farming town near the capital, has been told by the Maoists to "move the school by June 2005 or we will move it for you."
The school, run by the Shiva Charity trust and the Ginette Harrison Memorial Fund, provides primary education to about 200 Nepalese children. Ginnette died in 1999 while climbing Mt Dhaulagiri.
When Bob Uppington, the chairman of trustees of Shiva Charity, visited the school, he noted that the only "facilities at the school seemed to be the building, blackboards and chalk... even the tables and chairs, and exercise books were only recently acquired from the previous month's donation."
Shiva Charity was planning to build an annexe to the rented building for nursery students when the Maoists stepped in with their order.
According to the insurgents, who control large parts of the districts of Nepal and are refusing to start peace talks with the present government, the school authorities must build a completely new school about half a kilometre away.
They have given no reason for their diktat though the charity suspects it is because of the school's nearness to a government school.
The distraught charity has started a campaign to raise funds. Though it has acquired a new plot, courtesy the Festival Medical Services in Bath, and the Ginette Harrison Memorial Fund has chipped in with 3,000 pounds sterling (Rs.240,000), it says it still needs about 13,000 pounds (Rs.1.04 million) to build the classrooms.
"The Maoists need to be stopped from this kind of activity," said a campaign started to raise awareness about the plight of the school.
The insurgents, who have been fighting an eight-year guerrilla war to replace Nepal's constitutional monarchy with a communist republic, have made educational institutions in the rural areas one of their prime targets.
Teachers have been killed, some inside their schools, students abducted to join their "people's army" and classes closed forcibly for indefinite periods to pressure the government into conceding their demands.
Currently, over 16,000 students are hit by an indefinite closure of educational institutions in Birendranagar since Tuesday. The closure has been enforced by the student wing of the Maoists to demand the release of a cadre, the Kathmandu Post daily reported Thursday.