We started our day with an excursion to the Center of Resilient Development, a non-governmental, non-profit organization. They are focused on research about the sustainable reconstruction technologies in Nepal. But also do trainings and have built their own demo-house for other NGO’s who are having reconstructions projects.
We had a meeting with the president of CoRD, Dr Hari Darshan Shrestra. He presented, that Nepal still has roughly 4,7 million houses, and approximately 80% of them are built with stone and mud. Therefore, he argues that Nepal is going to have stone and mud buildings up to the next 50-100 years. At the same time the government is mostly promoting building methods based on concrete, steel and RCC. The majority of Nepalese people also sees the RCC and concrete house safer than traditional stone- and mud-houses. But he has a solution for making old stone and mud buildings more earthquake resistant: The idea is to install galvanized Iron wire mesh around the stones, the same technique is used to prevent the landslides on roadsides. The G.I. wire mesh technique would allow the use more local materials for reconstruction and it could be also installed in already existing buildings. The biggest challenge for this technique is that there is no scientific research about the properties of the technique when it’s used in houses. That is a topic that would be interesting to dig deeper in to.
After the CoRD meeting, we went to the AITM for our presentation about our results from Dhungentar. We had just a limited time to go through our interviews so we presented what we processed so far and what is the recovery status in Dhungentar. The presentation went well, and it was so great to meet the AITM students again and share our thoughts about last weeks’ experience.
Before going back to our place, we made a small tourist round just before sunset and visited the Swayambhunath. It is a Buddhist temple and it is also called the monkey temple because of the holy monkeys living around it.
