Our volunteer Justin Langford is a Fire Captain with the Sparks Nevada Fire Department.  Justin has worked on a lot of wildfires that required the ability to use local resources and materials as a means of expediting services and cutting costs.  He was able to put those skills to work on our Pisgar/Duskhun sheet metal drop.  Working through an interpreter, Justin and the local sheet metal merchant in Mude determined that giving eligible villagers a coupon for a bundle of sheet metal might save time, money and the potential for a materials hijacking of one of our long-distance truck runs from Kathmandu.

The villagers would present their coupon to the local steel merchants in either Mude or Barabise and receive their sheet metal.  We would then reimburse the merchants for the coupons they held.

It worked great.  Villagers pooled their coupons together and used local trucks to pick up their bundles.  Our area supervisor, Shiva Karki, supervised the distribution along with help from the Nepal Army. He returned to Kathmandu to meet with Deepak and presented a full ledger of each villager who received sheeting. We paid him $9000 for the sheet metal reimbursement and he returned to the project area and paid the metal distributors.