Thank you, from Tim Gocher OBE DL. 10th September 2026

To the Master, Wardens and members of the Worshipful Company of Plumbers

Thirteen days ago a wall of water and rock came down the Bhote Koshi from the Tibetan border and destroyed the district of Rasuwa, where Dolma Foundation has worked for 23 years, where my wife Pooja is from, and where I took our four PPDS volunteers last November to install the clean water system in the village of Bokhejunda. Six children from the school we support are dead. 14 people from Bokhejunda and its two neighbouring villages are dead. Many fathers and brothers who were at the border driving lorries before the year’s biggest festival are gone with them. Pooja’s family, high above the valley in Dhunche, are safe, and Bokhejunda itself was untouched. Dhunche has become the refuge for everyone below it who lost a home.

The Master’s appeal to the Livery on 30 August became the single largest source of support for this emergency. More than seventy of you gave, from £10 to £2,000, and the Plumbers Charity added £2,500. Together with our friends and family, three churches, the Essex Lieutenancy and an anchor donor who rebuilt a village with us after the 2015 earthquake, 250 people have now given or pledged £56,000 in under two weeks, without a single line of press (which David Blunkett, our Patron, is working on).

Here is where it goes. Relief is flying into Dhunche by helicopter while the road is rebuilt, and our volunteers are working alongside the Nepal Army on what is actually short: medicines, hygiene supplies, infant formula, clean water. Two of the distribution points are schools where the Company helped us build water systems. Your earlier work is now the infrastructure of this response.

The school reopens in two days. That matters more than it sounds. It is the one fixed point left in those children’s lives.

Six children who lost a parent will be moved from day places to full boarding and funded through to the end of their schooling, not for a year or two but to the finish. We learned in 2015 that anything less leaves a child stranded when the money runs out. We are also building a register of every child in the district who has lost a parent, to be matched against government records, so that none are missed.

I said something at my church on Sunday that I want to repeat here. I have now lived through two great disasters in Nepal, the other being the 2015 earthquake. Each time I have watched something remarkable happen alongside the grief. People who have never met me, who owe me nothing and will get nothing back, give what they can because someone is suffering. There is only one reason for that, pure compassion, the very best part of humanity. It is what keeps a small volunteer charity going when the scale of a tragedy would otherwise be crushing.

I have been proud to be a Liveryman of this Company for many years. I have never been prouder than in the last fortnight.

The road will reopen, the towns will be rebuilt, and the Foundation will do what it has always done in Rasuwa: keep the children in school, keep the water clean, and know every family by name. I will report properly to the Court in October.

Thank you.

Tim Gocher OBE DL
Liveryman
Chairman, Dolma Foundation
Registered charity 1150624
dolmafoundation.org/rasuwa