Some heroes don’t wear capes, they ring school bells. Rajendra Dawadi has now spoken to NDTV about the morning he evacuated his entire school in minutes. As catastrophic flash floods tore through Nepal, one school principal’s quick thinking meant that not a single one of his 900 students lost their lives.
Moments later, a colleague confirmed his worst fears. Speaking to NDTV, he recalled how the day started like any other. “It was a normal day. Dawadi initially went to check things out himself. That colleague then rode off on a motorbike to warn others. Soon after, the floodwaters tore through the area, sweeping away buildings, bridges and other structures, including the school itself. “I felt a lot of pain. I was also a student of the same school. “Then I sat down, and I became very emotional. I couldn’t do anything.
Dawadi, 47, is the principal and an English teacher at Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary School in the Trishuli Valley. Classes started at 6.30, and I was there,” he said. At around 9.10 am, while he was teaching a class, a staff member rushed into the room with an urgent warning. I spent most of my life there, about 70 per cent of it,” he added. Dawadi has taught at the school for the past 23 years, having once been a student there himself.
“At ten past nine, one of my accountants shouted and said, ‘The flood is coming, everything is flooding,'” Dawadi said. “I was inside the classroom, and I came into the basement,” he said. “Then one of my colleagues came near me and said, ‘Sir, the flood is coming, and the whole village is swept upwards,'” he recalled. Around the same time, more warnings started coming in from colleagues and a school guard, who told Dawadi he wanted to take his own child to safety. Asked what it felt like to look back and see the school gone, Dawadi said the moment overwhelmed him. I went up with my students, running and running up the hill, and when I looked back, nothing was there,” he said. “So everything was gone within 10 minutes,” he said.
