Eagle Creek Ambassador, Nick Greece, has visited Nepal five times over the last seven years as a tourist, a professional tandem pilot, and a worker to set up an education program in Pokhara, Nepal.

Nepal is a stunning country with sincerely kind and generous people. He has traveled there twice since the devastating earthquake on April 25, 2014. Nick helps run a non-profit that enables paragliding and hang gliding pilots to become successfully local agents of change. They have programs in Haiti, Nepal, Honduras, and in the US as well. He reported back after one of his trips.

Karmaflights, a program of the Cloudbase Foundation, has been based out of Pokhara, Nepal for the last six years. Just before the earthquake, they had achieved self-sustainability through building strong community ties, which made it economically viable for local business to support the altruistic community endeavors of the organization. They also were on the precipice of creating a bag program out of old paragliders at a fair-trade women’s co-op in Pokhara, which they would sell to the thousands of tourists that fly tandems in Pokhara as they wait for their Annapurna Basecamp Circuit to begin or end.

When the earthquake hit, the local led team rallied with over 100,000 dollars-worth of aid and supplies in the first week to the epicenter of the event, the Gorkha. This amazing group of Nepalis, and foreign paragliding pilots, led by Karmaflights In-Country Directors Prem Bahadur Kunwar, Isabella Messenger, and Jamie Messenger, ran towards the fire and in many incidences were the first aid teams on the scene.

(Check out the video of Karmaflight's efforts in Nepal)

Since then, the team has worked tirelessly with like-minded organizations, to work with communities in the epicenter to rebuild stronger, and better. A few of their amazing accomplishments are helping to build 1600 temporary shelters, administering and taking on 50 life-long scholarships for earthquake orphans, and re-building eleven schools and twenty-two libraries for Nepalis displaced by the quake. They also launched new waste management programs, food distribution centers, and are teaching earthquake resistant building techniques with locally sourced materials throughout the communities in the Gorkha.