When he asked what he and his group could do to repay Urkien’s village for all that he and the other Sherpas had done for them, Urkien replied with a school for the village’s children.
In 1963 the Thame Village contacted Hillary imploring for his help to build a school for their village. Sir Edmund without hesitation agreed to help that village, despite knowing that it would require a lot of resources on his part to build the school. It was his deep sense of gratitude toward the people of that Himalayan region that drove him. According to Sir Edmund, who had mentioned it on many occasions, it was the Sherpas who taught him so much about being immovable in the face of adversity while living in what some would consider inhospitable alpine terrain. However, Sir Hillary’s personal mission of gratitude did not simply end at building several schools. There were increasingly more and more requests from the local villages at the base of Everest that requested humanitarian help in form of education. Another encounter with a disease which a lot of Europeans had mostly forgotten by that time expanded Sir Edmund’s mission. It was smallpox outbreak that could potentially wipe out local communities due to the lack immunisation among locals. Moreover, there was no cure for such a disease and the only way to escape it was via prior immunisation which was conducted on Sir Hillary’s request. In the end only 26 lives were taken by the disease saving thousands. This account brought even more fame to the “Big Man” as the Sherpas called him. However, it was modesty and humility of Sir Edmund which made his fame ill-desired. Over the years, Himalayan Trust, a charity organisation founded by Sir Edmund and his wife Louise in 1960s, helped thousands of Sherpas to gain access to education, sanitation and clean water facilities facilitating everlasting legacy