TERRIFIC TEACHER: An ailing Dhakal teaches English to his students at Janabal Secondary School

The man wears a well ironed suit and shiny shoes. He puts on a baseball cap, grabs his briefcase and heads out to the mountains to go to work. He walks miles on a rocky road, crossing muddy paths, jumping over streams and traversing sagging bridges to make it to the meetings he occasionally has in a school in a neighbouring village.
Durga Dhakal, 48, is the principal and an English teacher at the Janabal Secondary School in Marpha of Mustang district. Surrounded by the Annapurnas on one side and Dhaulagiri on the other, he often walks along the Kali Gandaki to avoid waiting for a bus that may never show up.

Dhakal in a meeting with his colleagues

He's been based in this region for years and lives in the school hostel along with his colleagues. Besides sharing a room to live in, a stove to cook on, and the same jobs, they share another commonality: their wives and children live away, far enough that visits are rather rare. Dhakal's family lives in Pokhara. He occasionally flies there to visit them. Not too often, he adds sadly.

The teachers share a light moment in the school hostel

Having a job he loves and colleagues he enjoys makes the lack of other options more bearable. He talks on the phone with his wife regularly, however those conversations are rather brief. They don't discuss much, intimacy is gone after years of being apart. It's not a long distance romance, it's mostly logistics.

Dhakal sits in a restaurant, his face candlelit, as the power is out. He sips some raxi, to ward off the cold nights here at 3,000m above sea level. "Our life is brutal in a way," he says, remembering his distant family.

Loneliness is a tough void to fill, even with incredible landscapes from the top of the world. Heart and soul have different priorities, let alone the brain.

My last glimpse of him was as he taught English to a handful of students even though he was unwell. He kept walking around the class however, joking with his students, teasing them and encouraging them at the same time.

"It was kept as an extraordinary life of loving," he wrote on the blackboard.

PICS: JANA AšENBRENNEROVá

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