Last spring, Ben Ayers ’99 found himself 300 feet off the ground, tethered to a cliff in Nepal’s Hongu River Valley. As he tried to operate a video camera, the largest honeybees in the world buzzed around him.

Ten feet away, his friend Mauli Dhan Rai hung from a bamboo rope ladder, skillfully detaching  the bees’ hive from the cliff. Inside was what is known as “mad honey,” whose hallucinogenic properties make it valuable internationally.

The dangerous work was part of an ancient tradition, and Ayers and a documentary film crew, trying not to spin out of control on their ropes, were capturing it on video for the very first time — the culmination of years of trust-building groundwork by Ayers.

Aging honey hunter Mauli Dhan Rai, on his last honey hunt, climbs a bamboo rope ladder toward a beehive on a cliff face. Below him, a team lights a grass fire whose smoke disorients the bees. (Renan Ozturk)

A significant voice for sustainable development in Nepal, Ayers is the executive director of the , whose focus on long-term, community-driven development has made the nonprofit one of the most effective in Nepal.

Ayers befriended Rai nearly a decade earlier, and over the years Ayers and dZi had worked on several projects in Rai’s village, Saddi. Nearly from the moment Ayers met Rai, he wanted to film the honey hunter. “I kept going back to that tiny village to win his trust, to be able to make the film,” Ayers says.

And after “literally years of conversations and negotiations” with Rai, community members, and local shamans, Ayers and his team did gain their trust and, finally, approval.

By then, Rai was older — 58 at the time of the filming — and less willing to do the dangerous work of harvesting beehives. So when Ayers and a National Geographic-backed production crew set out to follow a honey hunt, they knew it could very well be Rai’s last.

The resulting film was The Last Honey Hunter, released in 2018. Ayers returned to campus in early May for a screening in the Benjamin Mays Center.

Honey hunter Mauli Dhan Rai winces as bees sting him during the harvest. (Renan Ozturk)

The years of conversations and engagement that made the film possible are the same long game that makes dZi so effective, especially following Nepal’s 2015 earthquake. Many aid organizations there and elsewhere work in the short term, bringing in food or goods during a crisis. dZi on education, sanitation, and infrastructure for at least nine years at a time.

The approach is to “trust the people who need help,” Ayers said. “Let’s trust that the poor know what they’re doing. We’ve created different systems of helping people overcome poverty through their own intelligence and through their own methodology.”

The Hongu River Valley, where Rai lived and harvested honey, is one of the most remote in Nepal. When Ayers first visited Saddi, it was a week from the nearest road. The Kulung people who inhabit the area live primarily off subsistence farming, with few means to buy and sell goods.

“There are great challenges to being in this life,” Ayers said. “Poverty, sickness, being seven days away from a doctor, are very serious things. But also what you see in these communities is that there’s a need for people to rely on one another.”

Wearing bee suits, Renan Ozturk and Ben Ayers ’99 prepare to capture Mauli Dhan Rai as he harvests a valuable hallucinogenic honey from a cliffside in Nepal’s Hongu River Valley. (Renan Ozturk)

Harvesting mad honey was an important source of income for some community members and for Rai, who Ayers said had a difficult life and was not highly regarded in Saddi.

In fact, though a team supported him in the effort, Rai was the only one allowed to actually harvest the hives, according to the Kulung’s animist tradition. Kulung religious practices reflect a deep connection to the land: A creation story recounts how the first man descended from a nearby mountain peak, and the people believe in a multitude of forest spirits.

“For the Kulung, the whole pantheon of human existence is within their viewshed,” Ayers said. “These are people who are very connected to their land, and they’re connected to the spiritual world that comes out of their land. Shamans travel in between this sort of esoteric world and the human world that we live in.”

It was only with the approval of a particular spirit, given through a dream, that one was allowed to harvest honey. Rai had the dream as a teenager and had harvested honey ever since.

Ben Ayers ’99 has spent most of his working life in Nepal. He is the executive director of the dZi Foundation, whose focus on long-term, community-driven development has made the nonprofit one of the most effective in Nepal. (Courtesy of the dZi Foundation)

(The honey itself causes hallucinations, along with vomiting and diarrhea. “There are better ways to spend a weekend,” said Ayers, who has tried it himself.)

Twice a year, Rai and his team of helpers performed a ceremony with a shaman and then journeyed to the cliffs, where Rai would spend three days cutting pieces from the hives. He sold the honey and beeswax to a local trader, who passed it out of the village and Nepal.

It was exhausting, dangerous work, and by the time Ayers was trying to make a film, Rai knew his honey-hunting days were winding down.

“These are people who are very connected to their land, and they’re connected to the spiritual world that comes out of their land.”

Ayers returned to the village periodically over the years, getting to know Rai and his work better. In that time, the roads got closer and the outside world more accessible, so dZi’s goals shifted from poverty alleviation to adaptation to change, Ayers said.

Ben Ayers ‘99 poses with honey hunter Mauli Dhan Rai. (Courtesy of the dZi Foundation)

The people in the village, many of whom were initially afraid of disturbing the spirits in the forest, also warmed to the idea of a film crew accompanying Rai on a honey harvest. Rai himself liked the idea, but “he didn’t think I could do it,” Ayers said. “He didn’t think we could get ropes up there, that we were weak.”

But whenever Ayers returned to Saddi to check on dZi’s projects, “I’d meet him, and talk to him again. And I’d go back and talk to him again,” he said. “It was over that long course of time that he and I became friends, and I was able to gain access.”

Finally, in 2017, The Last Honey Hunter was a go.

Reflecting on his early work in Nepal, Ayers admits that “there was a part of me that very much wanted to be the white savior.” He liked spending time in Nepali communities, and he wanted to be the one solving their problems.

An English major at �ֲ���ý and “one of the Outing Club kids,” Ayers first went to Nepal during a study-abroad program.

This Himalayan country is a popular trekking destination, and trekkers hire local porters to carry their gear. Ayers became interested in the porters’ lives and even tried to become one for a short time, he told the audience at the �ֲ���ý screening.

“It was a real revelation for me to realize that the people I was walking with, these porters who had so much less than I had ever been given, had the same intellectual wealth that I did,” he said. “They had the same depth of experience and emotion that I did.

“While it sounds obvious, to get that sense was deeply influential in how I saw the world and how I saw people. I wanted to learn more about that, and I felt it was important for me to figure out a way to give something back.”

“By spending 10 years partnering with communities, you start to do these figure-eights, with one project morphing into another.”

After graduation, Ayers started Porters’ Progress, which advocated for porters’ rights. For years he went back and forth between Maine and Nepal, working in farming and forestry to fund his trips.

He found that swooping in with aid was not only wrongheaded, it was next to impossible. In the early 2000s, Nepal was in the throes of a civil war, with government forces controlling the trekking areas and Maoist rebels controlling rural areas like the Hongu River Valley. Because the porters lived in the country but worked on the trails, they were among the few who could pass between the two territories.

Interested in the experience of porters who hauled gear for climbers, Ben Ayers ’99 started Porters Progress after graduation. (Photograph courtesy of Ben Ayers)

So when Porters’ Progress got a grant, it solicited ideas from the porters on how to spend it, trained them in community development work, and sent them into otherwise-inaccessible communities to carry out the work.

“They proved themselves immediately,” Ayers said. “We were the only organization that was able to work through that situation. That premise of handing over control of the process to the locals is the philosophical basis of the work that we’re able to do.”

Ayers expanded that philosophy when he came to dZi, first as Nepal country director and then as executive director.

dZi’s work usually starts out with one project — sanitary toilets, a school building — but “solving” one problem tends to reveal many more. And one project cascades into others.

Ben Ayers and the dZi Foundation help communities in Nepal, like the village of Saddi, with sustainable, grassroots development projects. (Courtesy of the dZi Foundation)

For example: “We do a lot of sanitation programs, building toilets,” Ayers said. “We’ve also pioneered a lot of this technology called ecosan, which is when the toilets recycle urine. You separate the urine out, and that acts as an organic fertilizer. Super cool.

“Then we have all this fertilizer, and now the communities are interested in agriculture. Agriculture leads to cash-crop farming, and cash-crop farming leads to the need to have savings and loan cooperatives.

“For us, by spending 10 years partnering with communities, you start to do these figure-eights, with one project morphing into another.”

That, Ayers said, is how you make a sustainable difference in rural communities while empowering the communities themselves.

A side benefit is that you have enough time to persuade a hunter of hallucinogenic honey to let you make a movie about him.

The team that made The Last Honey Hunter — and produced a magazine piece — included director Ben Knight; Renan Ozturk, a climber and filmmaker; writer Mark Synnott; and Ayers.  

Making the film was “intense,” Ayers said. His team and Rai’s team trekked 12 miles through steep jungle terrain in monsoon season, crossing a river on a homemade bamboo bridge. Then they followed Rai up the cliff to the hives.

In this image, a camera is attached to a bamboo honey pole held by honey hunter Mauli Dhan Rai as he and his assistant Asdhan, right, cut a hive from the rock. With no safety system, they cling to the vertical wall with one hand while harvesting the honey with the other. This was Rai’s last harvest. (Renan Ozturk)

At first, the filmmakers, dangling freely from the cliff, spun around on their ropes too much to get good shots. The solution was to hang two people from the cliff at once, one acting as “ballast” so the other could stay still long enough to film. Ayers himself made high-angle shots.

The film crew also interviewed them and other villagers and captured intimate shots of daily life in Saddi. The result is a documentary that’s as much a reflection on Rai’s life as it is an adventure story.

“Mauli is the last one in his village who’s had the dream, and he’s too old to harvest,” Ayers said. “The whole narrative flow of the film is wondering who else could do it after him. He’s the last honey hunter.”

The first place Ayers screened the film was right in Saddi. The Last Honey Hunter has since been shown at several festivals and it won an award at the Camden (Maine) International Film Festival, qualifying it for an Oscar nomination.

In the film, Rai reflects that his position does not bring honor in the village. Life in Saddi is also still hard, Ayers said. dZi-guided programs have addressed nutrition and sanitation, but life expectancy is still relatively low, and healthcare is distant.

The harvest that Ayers’ team filmed was indeed Rai’s last. He died in May, shortly before the �ֲ���ý screening.

“I’ve been fortunate to be able to understand him and know him and be known by him, and be trusted enough to be with this story and be able to share it,” Ayers said.

“Mauli likely is the last honey hunter in that community, and for me to be able to bring him back to �ֲ���ý, where I feel very strongly my own story began, has been a real privilege.”

During a Thamo festival, Judson Peck poses with villagers who hold knives dotted with yak butter, a sign of blessing for a village shrine.

Mount Everest (left) and Lhotse (right) glow in the late-afternoon November sun about 20 miles from Thamo, elevation 12,000 feet.

The late-November morning sun begins to warm a greenhouse in the village of Thamo, within Sagarmatha National Park.

Organic gardening practices allow good pests, such as aphid-eating ladybugs, to live in the greenhouses.

By measuring the amount of ice in glasses of water inside and outside the greenhouses, Peck could calculate the intensity of the nighttime cold.

Nepalese villagers use high-altitude greenhouses to supplement centuries-old farming practices

Photographs and text by Judson Peck ’11

My plan was simple. The execution was tricky.

I would take a small plane into the Khumbu region of Nepal, then trek alone without guide or porter into Sagarmatha National Park, the highest mountain ecosystem in the world. Then I would settle into a village to research the plastic greenhouses used by Sherpa villagers to grow and harvest vegetables during the long, harsh winter.

My first challenge: Where the heck were these greenhouses? It’s not like they dot a Google map.

I had spent the previous few months in Kathmandu with the School for International Training, part of my �ֲ���ý Junior Semester Abroad program. There, I learned about Nepal’s history, politics, culture, and development issues. Then I began my independent study project. This was last November.

I knew the greenhouses were up there — somewhere — deep in Sagarmatha National Park, which encompasses part of Mount Everest (“Sagarmatha” is the Nepali name for Everest).

And I knew that the greenhouses had been donated to villages within the park as part of a program that compensates villages for the fact that the area’s tightly restricted natural resources are off-limits. But no one had done much research on how they were being used and their effect on these tight-knit communities.

So I trekked around to different places like Namche, Khumjung, Khunde, and Thame. Then, at 12,000 feet, I discovered the village of Thamo, sitting on a plateau against the rocky mountainside, home to about 35 households and 10 donated greenhouses that were flown by helicopter from Kathmandu.

The growing season had ended by my November visit, and Thamo in November is much like Maine in late fall — on the brink of winter. But even in the coldest weather and climates, from the Arctic tundra to the high mountains of Khumbu, only the growing season is limited. As anyone who’s thrown an old bedsheet over tomato plants before a cold September night knows, you can extend the harvest season by creating a warm and protected microclimate.

The donated greenhouses that create this microclimate at 12,000 feet feature thick, clear plastic that has been UV-stabilized so it won’t disintegrate. To withstand the mountain winds, the plastic is firmly attached to metal poles.

At dawn I sometimes woke to the clanging of bells as yak caravans plodded beneath my window.

In Thamo, I stayed at a guesthouse of the sort typically used by trekkers. As the sole guest most of the time, I was treated like family. I chatted in Nepali with the children about their schoolwork and ate daal bhaat — a traditional dish of rice and a kind of lentil soup — with the mother in the kitchen (the father worked at a nearby hotel and was away much of the time).

At night, my bedroom went well below freezing; most evenings I’d snuggle into my sleeping bag, wearing my winter jacket, and do my reading, like Four-Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman, who farms in Harborside, Maine.

One night I lay awake listening to the chants of four monks reverberate through the cold house as they blessed the family for the coming year. At dawn I sometimes woke to the clanging of bells as yak caravans plodded beneath my window carrying loads of woolens and knock-off North Face jackets from Tibet.

Every morning I trudged outside and broke the ice in the water bucket, then washed my face in freezing agony before the sun steamed it off my head. I didn’t bathe during my stay, partly because the bathing area was being used to hang drying meat and partly so I would fit in with daily life in the mountains.

I’d hoped to use my broken Nepali to interview the villagers but soon learned that they mostly speak Sherpa. I soon found a translator: Nawan, a trekking guide who has summited Everest himself.

As Nawan and I went from home to home, I learned that Sherpa culture demands that tea be served to visitors. Lots of tea meant many bathroom breaks but the tea-drinking sessions also fostered a relaxed setting for informal discussions.

On my last day in the village, a festival inaugurated the new village shrine. Among the rituals is placing yak butter on the men’s knives, khukuri, as a blessing and waving bamboo shafts with silk scarves attached. Four monks beat drums as the villagers chanted and drank raksi, a traditional and really strong distilled drink.

Afterward, there was dancing, then we staggered home over the rough terrain, knives in hand.

To New Heights

from my stay in Thamo, where high-altitude greenhouses have literally taken gardening to new heights:

• In the villagers’ traditional outdoor gardens and in the greenhouses, they grow mostly green leafy vegetables: lettuce, spinach, Chinese cabbage. During the June-September monsoon season, they grow everything from chilies and tomatoes to beans and squash.

• The greenhouses do save villagers money by producing inexpensive vegetables. But most of the food is eaten by families, so not enough is left over to sell in nearby Namche for income, as was hoped by the agencies that donated the greenhouses. (Still, it’s a big benefit to have year-round veggies.)

• My sense is that the greenhouses have not changed existing social or gender roles, as the women still do most of the gardening. The men often porter goods or guide trekkers, as Thamo is near the gateway to Mount Everest.

• Garden pests are a problem during the monsoon season. To combat pests, growers should improve the soil, since pests feast on weak plants. The growers already sweeten the acidic soil with wood ash, eggshells, and bone meal, but should also spread more compost and introduce “green manure”: plants that protect the soil and add nitrogen.

Environmental studies major Judson Peck is from Topsham, Vt. For his senior thesis in 2010–11, he will try to determine the political and environmental factors that create food scarcity in Nepal.

Those activities have waned, and now, thanks to a tourism boom, the place attracts a lot more people. There’s world-class mountain biking, whitewater rafting on the Colorado River, two national parks, and, as a result, an ever-increasing number of coffee shops and Mexican restaurants. Still, the nearest mall and big-box stores are 90-plus minutes away, and first-run movies take a month to find our tiny three-screen theater. The local newspaper is just a weekly.

In this amazing landscape (lots of films have been shot around here), accented by a quirky, tight-knit community of locals, I’ve found my home. But living here has its tradeoffs, the most apparent of which is a disconnection from part of my identity — my �ֲ���ý identity. Where I live, folks don’t just ask, “Where’s �ֲ���ý College?” but “Where’s Maine?”

�ֲ���ý itself is 2,000 miles away, and my closest college friends live in the Pacific Northwest or New England. Attending �ֲ���ý weddings and visiting other friends during my travels helps me get a fix on my �ֲ���ý identity, as do the e-mail �ֲ���ýNews updates. A �ֲ���ý calendar hangs in my home office.

Even as I’m feeling cut off from the place and people that helped form part of my self, my work here is all about place. My job with the Bioregional Outdoor Education Project helps rural schoolteachers instill in their students a stronger sense of place. The idea is that students who have a relationship with their outdoor place will become better citizens, more inclined to protect and interact with their environment.

On one summer trip to train teachers in outdoor education, I met a woman about my age. As we camped in the bean fields of eastern Utah and talked about our backgrounds, I learned that she was from New England. I peppered her with questions: What part? Was she familiar with the New England colleges?

Well, she wasn’t just familiar with the New England colleges. She was a �ֲ���ý alumna — Sarah Merrill Strouthopoulos, Class of 1996.

My class. But we never knew one another as students.

It seemed impossible. But as she and I recreated our �ֲ���ý years, we realized that we had led parallel and separate �ֲ���ý lives. Sarah was an art history major; I toiled in the geology labs. She lived off campus; I was a happy Frye Street resident. She spent her junior year abroad in Nepal, while I spent a semester in Ecuador. She was a varsity skier, and I played rugby.

After that surprise mini-reunion, Sarah and I continued to work together during the school year. She is an elementary school teacher in Durango, Colo., about three hours from my home office in Moab. Every other week, I traveled to her classroom to work with her and her students. We set up compass courses in her schoolyard, conducted “Animal Olympics” with her students and their parents, and planned field trips throughout the year.

Sarah and I spent a rich school year reliving our time at �ֲ���ý, but we also created a new chapter: us working together on outdoor and place-based education projects, while her students’ wide eyes told us we were accomplishing our goals. To our shared stories of �ֲ���ý — we laughed about the housing lottery and recalled our graduation speaker — we added new ones, like her students’ highly amusing oral reports on Colorado eco-zones.

The teacher certification program culminates with an extended backcountry rafting trip on the San Juan River. Winding through southern Utah and the northern Navajo Reservation, Sarah and I realized that we had discovered a new sense of place, but not in strict geographical terms. Instead, it’s more like a deep awareness, one that was planted and grown in each of us during our �ֲ���ý years, when we learned to take risks, challenge ourselves, and meet new people.

Separately, Sarah and I put down roots here in the West, drawn by a love of the landscape, the environment, and the people. But she and I are connected, and we are connected to others, across miles, across years, and across differences.

By Erika Jones ’96, Illustration by Marty Braun

Ayers is the force behind Porters’ Progress, a non-profit organization that provides empowering education and apparel suitable to harsh Himalyan conditions to mountain porters in Nepal. �ֲ���ý is one stop on a U.S.-Canadian tour that Ayers is making with his 90-minute presentation, which includes a slide show and the award-winning BBC documentary Carrying the Burden, a 2001 Banff Mountain Film Festival selection.

A creative writing major at �ֲ���ý, Ayers spent a junior semester in Nepal. In that country known for stunning natural beauty and harsh poverty, he started working with the porters who accompany tourist treks in the Himalayas. Moved by the hardships that these hardy and hardworking people endure, he founded Porters’ Progress after graduation.

Not to be confused with the Sherpas famed for their role in newsmaking mountain climbs, the porters that Ayers supports are typically lowland farmers who augment a subsistence living by carrying luggage for tourist treks. In thin clothes and flimsy shoes, they spend weeks at high altitudes carrying up to 250 pounds. Their cargo baskets are strapped to their foreheads with a cord that distributes weight to the spine.

“There’s a certain brilliance to them,” Ayers says, “that I was amazed at in the face of such hardship.”

Ayers’ presentation is sponsored by the New World Coalition, the Anti-Sweatshop Coalition and Amnesty International.