Bringing Progress to Paradise: What I Got from Giving to a Mountain Village in Nepal

What does it mean to bring progress–schools, electricity, roads, running water–to paradise? Can our consumer culture and desire to "do good" really be good for a community that has survived contentedly for centuries without us?

In October 2008, climbing expedition leader and attorney, Jeffrey Rasley, led a trek to a village in a remote valley in the Solu region of Nepal named Basa. His group of three adventurers was only the third group of white people ever seen in this village of subsistence farmers. What he found was people thoroughly unaffected by Western consumer-culture values. They had no running water, electricity, or anything that moves on wheels. Each family lived in a beautiful, hand-chiseled stone house with a flower garden. Beyond what they already had, it seemed all they wanted was education for the children. He helped them finish a school building already in progress, and then they asked for help getting electricity to their village.

Bringing Progress to Paradise describes Rasley's transformation from adventurer to committed philanthropist. We are attracted to the simpler way of life in these communities, and we are changed by our experience of it. They are attracted to us, because we bring economic benefits. Bringing Progress to Paradise offers Rasley's critical reflection on the tangled relationship between tourists and locals in "exotic" locales and the effect of Western values on some of the most remote locations on earth.

"This is an inspiring and thoughtful book, presenting - in graphic detail - the author's treks to Basa 6, a tiny village in the Himalayas, to bring a school and hydroelectricity to the villagers, out of love for their beautiful culture and warm receptivity to his efforts. But the central issue … not resolved in the pages of the book, demanding a sequel, is the question of whether the "Progress"… might lead to some degree of corruption of their way of life, a consumerist, Western-oriented degradation of a spiritual depth and sensitivity to their surroundings - the beautiful Himalayas, their tradition of flower-beds around every home. Will the flowers spoil? Or is that a truly paternalistic question - leaving a "quaint" village in periodic food shortages, a precious museum for the rare Westerner to come across, off the beaten path of the Sherpa-guided mountaineering treks? The question is partially answered: he determines to go ahead with fund-raising efforts, since the villagers clearly want the benefits brought by Internet-capable education for their children, and who is he, after all, to deny what he can provide? But the question remains open. I can hardly wait for the necessary follow-up in the next book of the series." John McLaughlin, PhD.

Bringing Progress to Paradise is the first in the sequence of books about Rasley's adventures in the Himalayas and his unique relationship with the Edenic village of Basa, Nepal.