Famille & Voyages, le podcast voyage en famille, inspiration pour vos prochaines vacances · Stéphanie Cordier

Rénover une école au Népal avec ses enfants - le voyage en famille de Rémi (best episode)

March 25, 2026·1 hr 2 min·5 clips

Rémi took his two young children to Nepal to renovate a school and connect a village to water.

1. The Famille & Voyages podcast features Rémi, from the Bassin d'Arcachon, describing a humanitarian family trip to Nepal in January 2023 with his ex-wife and their two children aged 5 and 10. 2. Host Stéphanie opens by noting this episode is different from others — a humanitarian trip rather than a leisure trip — and flags that Rémi has returned to Nepal since, unable to stop at one mission. 3. The episode's core question is whether a family with young children can meaningfully participate in humanitarian work abroad, and what that experience does to the people involved. 4. Rémi describes his motivation as a 'mid-life crisis' realisation that his comfortable life was missing purpose; he spent two to three years looking for a humanitarian project before finding Nepal via a YouTube search for 'Mission Humanitaire Népal.' 5. The 2015 Nepal earthquake, which killed approximately 17,000 people, had created needs Rémi knew were still unmet eight years later; his interest in Buddhist culture provided an additional pull toward Nepal specifically. 6. He found bilingual Nepali guide Shanker through a chain of contacts: a YouTube video of a French group connecting a village to water, the video's editor, and then a phone number for Shanker, who spoke French from years of leading French trekking groups. 7. Over four months, Rémi and Shanker scoped two projects and Rémi raised approximately €9,000 from personal contacts and local companies — split between a school renovation of around €4,500 and a water-connection project of approximately €3,500, with the surplus used for additional needs on site. 8. Before leaving, Rémi presented the project at his children's schools; he later returned with a film of the mission, generating questions from children and parents that he hopes inspire other families to consider humanitarian travel. 9. The family spent two days at the Shechen monastery in Kathmandu — where French Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard (author of 'The Monk and the Philosopher') is based — participating in 5:30am collective prayers with monks chanting mantras to drums and bells, and a brief meditation session in the room of the monastery's founder Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. 10. They then visited the Namo Buddha stupa, roughly 40 kilometres from Kathmandu, which marks the location where, according to Buddhist tradition, the future Buddha sacrificed himself to feed a starving tigress and her cubs. 11. The 170-kilometre local bus journey from Kathmandu to Pokhara took close to 10 hours due to continuously reconstructed roads; during the journey a passenger boarded with a live goat that Rémi's ex-wife held for 15 minutes before the animal was dropped off at the next stop. 12. In the village of Chapakot west of Pokhara, the family was received by all the women of the village in a formal welcome ceremony — each woman placing flower necklaces and scarves on the family members and pressing a tikka (turmeric powder) mark onto each person's forehead as a sign of happiness. 13. The family slept on hard straw mattresses in the host family's home, ate dalbat (rice, lentil soup, vegetables) three times a day, and lived in a system Rémi describes as circular and waste-free: buffalo milk taken each morning, corn ground for flour, food waste returned to animals. 14. School renovation work involved sanding floors, repainting interior and exterior walls, installing windows with integrated mosquito nets, laying carpet in the youngest children's classrooms, and distributing new uniforms, school bags, and supplies to all 60 students aged 3 to 9. 15. For the water project, villagers — including women Rémi estimates were aged 70 to 80 — dug a 100-metre trench on a steep slope with pickaxes and carried cement bags to pour a 15,000-litre spring-fed cistern; the system was completed in 15 days. 16. Midway through the renovation, guide Shanker showed the family a second school with approximately 30 students in what Rémi describes as a catastrophic state; walking into the classrooms made the whole family cry, and they decided immediately to renovate it as well — completing the work in four to five days and turning it into what Rémi calls 'almost the reference school in the region.' 17. At the departure ceremony, elected officials and villagers gathered with scarves, handmade diplomas bearing each family member's name, and speeches of thanks; Rémi says Nepal is 'probably the most grateful country in the world.' 18. Daily life in the village included 30-minute walks to school in the morning (sometimes shortened by stopping passing motorcycles or tuktuks), meals at noon with village families near the school, and evenings working alongside the host family — shelling corn, cutting branches for fire. 19. The episode is narrated in French by Rémi in a conversational interview format with Stéphanie; the tone is reflective and emotionally engaged, with Rémi describing personal transformation and the founding of an association after returning to France. 20. The episode will appeal most to French-speaking parents interested in purpose-driven family travel, humanitarian work in South Asia, or Buddhist culture in Nepal; it is labelled 'best episode' by the show.

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