A year later, Lapu folks reminisce their good Samaritan royal visitor

Rosha Basnet / Kathmandu, March 29: Last year this day, the locals of Lapu-3, now Tharpe rural municipality, in Gorkha district had bade farewell to Prince Harry who had spent five-days in their locality perusing his charitable endeavor.

Locals fondly recall the young British Prince where he made many memories with the locals, including Manmaya Tamang of the Lapu Guest House.

In a telephone interview, Tamang recounted,” We were told that the high-ranking officials of the British Army were arriving but the British Prince himself came unannounced!”

Delighted to host the royal guest and his team, she gushed that the royal guest was every inch a regular guy who relished the locally grown vegetables and food she served with motherly affection.

The Prince, whose career spanned a decade-long stint in the Army, however followed a military discipline when it comes to work, according to Somkaji Gurung, one of the elderly onlookers who recalled Harry in subtle-colored casual wear going construction site sharp on time.

He chimed in that Harry went to work at 8 am after breakfast and returning to hotel at 11 am for brunch and rest. Then again after lunch at 12-1 pm, he would set out to the work hand-in-hand with his team and the locals to rebuild the 11-roomed Prabhat Kiran Secondary School.

Jeev Tamu, the Head Teacher of the School, shared that the high-spirited Prince would thoroughly execute anything thrown at him like carrying ‘doko’, fetching timbers and rocks from the nearby forest. “The teachers, students and the locals here are bound to miss Prince Harry in the inaugural of the school scheduled on April 2 this year,” he said nostalgically, informing that Prince Harry and his team had work for four days continuously and had called off their work for a day that was mired by sand storm and rain.

Interestingly, the locals buoyant of Prince Harry’s contribution have renamed a hill close to the School as ‘Harry Hill’.” The board displaying the new name of the hill has been one of the attractions among the visitors, informed Tamu.

The British Prince, formally known as Prince Henry Charles Albert David, and popularly known as Prince Harry, had arrived in Nepal on a five-day state visit starting from March 19 last year to commemorate the bicentennial relationship between Nepal and the UK.

On the last day of his formal visit, the Prince of Wales had articulated his intent to extend his visit to ‘do a small bit’ to help in the reconstruction drive in the country he admitted to hold a ‘special place’ in his heart.

After a day of break, the then 31-year-old Prince and his 20-member entourage had discreetly dashed off to the Gorkha by road teaming up with the Team Rubicon to help rebuild the School in Lapu but Harry’s discrete dash could not remain out of media’s glare.

Gorkha district was one of the 14 hardest hit districts by the Gorkha Earthquake on April 25, 2015. The epicenter of the 7.6 magnitude quake lies in Barpark in the district.

Much as Prince Harry wanted to visit Gorkha incognito, the pictures of Prince Harry standing in a local shop in Gorkha started making rounds in the social networking sites.

The pictures spread like a wildfire in no time and local media persons followed Prince Harry and his team hoping to break some ‘exclusive’ news.

One among them was RSS’s Gorkha correspondent Prasanna Pokharel that Prince Harry would despise the publicity then, hence he kept himself indoor be it in the four-wheeler he was travelling or in the hotel later as long as his team members ensured him that there were no media persons stalking him.

Pokharel confided that he had travelled for five hours on motorbike and walked three hours chasing the Prince. He even managed to secure a room in an adjacent hotel to the Lapu Guest House where Prince Harry and his team, comprising 17 British nationals most of whom were former soldiers and three Nepalis, were lodging.

“I was so keen to explore the other dynamics of Prince Harry as a person and his activities in the locality. I followed him like paparazzi and broke the news of Prince Harry in Lapu through the RSS but in the wee hours of other day, some Nepalis from the Harry’s team requested privacy for the privacy-averse Prince,” he exclaimed.

On the contrary, during his time in Kathmandu, Lalitpur , Bhaktapur, Bardia and Pokhara, the fifth-in-the-line to throne had not shunned the shutterbugs jostling to capture his hives of activities , not to mention his cheeky antics, especially with children and elderly, that he is famed for.

During his downtime, he would love to play with the local kids as the older persons would enjoy watching the British Prince enjoying the mundane moments while some would join in banter with him, elderly Gurung chipped in, matter-of-factly.

Although a year has passed since the Prince Harry visited the place, locals of Lapu don’t only fondly recall the time spend with him but also wish to see him revisiting the place someday in future. RSS