Meet the 68-year-old grandfather going to school in Nepal
With a white beard, walking stick and eight grandchildren Gurgan Kami isn't the typical student at his local secondary school
It’s a routine that will be familiar to hundreds of school kids up and down the UK, eat your breakfast, pack your bag and then rush out the door to make it to school in time.
But for Nepal’s oldest student, the 68-year-old Durga Kami, the walk to school is perhaps the most difficult part of the day.
After breakfast, his one meal of the day, the grandfather who dreams of one day becoming a teacher, grabs his walking stick and begins the hour long trudge to join his 14 and 15-year-old classmates at the local secondary school.
Six days a week in a one room school with two hundred other pupils, Durga Kami learns the skills he hopes will make his dreams of teaching one day become a reality.
At first Kami’s classmates thought it was strange to have a geriatric as a classmate.
Since he joined them last year they’ve warmed to the old man – calling him ‘Baa’, which is Nepali for dad.
"I used to think 'why is this old man coming to school to study with us?' but as time passed I enjoyed his company,” his 14-year-old class mate Sagar Thapa said.
Durga Kami came back to school to escape the loneliness of his rural hilltop home after the death of his wife.
“To forget my sorrows I go to school," Mr Kami told Reuters photojournalist Navesh Chitrakar.
Forced to leave school without the ability to read or write, he first went to primary school with kids aged just seven-years-old.
The grandfather of eight quickly relearned what he had forgotten since necessity had forced him out of the classroom as a child.
After mastering the basics, Kami was given a scholarship to the local secondary school.
"This is my first experience teaching a person who is as senior as my father's age," said DR Koirala, his teacher:
"I feel very excited and happy."
Despite all his school boy success poverty hasn’t disappeared from Durgma Kami’s life.
Kami spends his nights studying in darkness and often skips meals so he can afford to go to school.
He doesn’t led his grinding poverty stop him, telling reporters Kami he wanted to keep studying until his death.
He also hopes to inspire the next generation saying:
"If they see an old person with white beard like me studying in school they might get motivated as well.”
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