SOME BACKGROUND 
INFORMATION Virginia, the founding Trustee of Roads to Rehab Nepal, has a long and enduring history in Nepal. She has visited the country almost forty times now since 1996 in a varied capacity which included volunteering, trekking and accompanying trekking groups for the best trekking company in the whole of Nepal, Adventure Thamserku https://adventurethamserku.com
She has volunteered several times on an annual basis as a member of a surgical team with an organisation called Open Heart International and helped establish and worked with a UK charity called Classrooms in the Clouds from 2010 to 2012. In 2012, whilst trekking in the Langtang valley, she was asked to do something to provide healthcare in the region as the closest hospital was a two day walk away. Being hopeless at saying ‘no’, she set up an organisation called Langtang Valley Health (Australia). This project was tragically destroyed by an avalanche that fell on the village following the earthquake in 2015. Virginia also helped the Australian Himalayan Foundation establish a pilot project in the Solu Khumbu region based on the nurse initiated model of care she developed for Langtang.
Thanks to so many visits to Nepal, some very patient teachers and some study of the language, she has also written a Nepalese language book (click here to purchase a copy) Practical Nepali – Learning Nepali the Easy Way – which is for sale on Amazon and is great for people who want to be able to speak passable Nepalese but don’t need to know how to read or write the script.
Following the earthquake, Langtang Valley Health Australia raised $80,000 for the surviving Langtang community to help with relief and rebuilding. A difficult decision was made to close the organisation for a multitude of complex reasons. Virginia had become aware of Samrat’s wonderful initiatives through Facebook and was so impressed with what they were doing, she offered to help. He willingly accepted, so she visited Nepal again to meet him and discuss the project, spent several months doing all the administrative work required to register anon-profit organisation in Australia, and Roads to Rehab Nepal was born in December 2016.