Most Nangi villagers still stick to the old way of doing things: Corn is still hung under small thatched shelters and the houses are still made out of mud and mortar.

But with Pun’s pioneering efforts, the village that doesn’t have a single phone line, is now the heart of a wireless Internet work that includes 14 other villages, with access to services like telemedicine, distance learning, and e-commerce. All these because of one man’s unquenchable thirst to improve the educational system of his beloved village.

Pun credits his fervor for education to his father, who despite their family’s poor conditions, insisted that he continue with high school education. While most of Pun’s friends tended ship and cattle, Pun was going to high school in a town hours away from the village.

"My father served in the British Army for 15 years, and he saw the importance of education. That is why he insisted on sending me to school," he says. "Most of the people my age were being recruited into the British Army, but my father took me to high school instead."

It was hard to understand what his father was doing at that time, specially so that his family suffered as for sending him to school. But once done with high school, Pun found himself teaching, and soon saw why his father persisted.

"It was only when I finished 12th grade and became a teacher for 12 years that I realized education was really important," he says. "From then on everything I earned I spent for the schooling of my brothers and sisters. And even after 12 years of teaching, I still felt very eager to go to school and study again."

That eagerness would soon take him to the United States where Pun got a scholarship to the University of Nebraska. It was 1989, and Pun was already 32 years old.

"Everyone was telling me that I was too old," he recalls with a laugh. "But I really wanted to study again."

Despite the distance he had to cross, Pun says that he had very little to adjust to once he found himself on the plains of Nebraska.

"The only problem I had during my first year was the fact that Nebraska was so flat, and I was not used to living on flat lands," he says. "There was a lot of people there older than I was so I didn’t feel so alone. A lot of them had granddaughters who were now going to high school and they wanted to go to college now that they have the time."

With his scholarship, Pun was able to clinch a master’s degree in education, as well quite a few extra subjects under his belt. Pun meant to take all that he was learning back to Nepal in the hopes that it would improve the educational system in the country.

"Apart from my major, I took business classes and computer classes. I was allowed to take anything and I wanted to learn, so I took a lot of extra classes since I didn’t have to pay anyway," he says. "Teaching at a public school, I was not satisfied with the system that the government had in place. I wanted to do something different than just following the government textbooks. That was why I was always thinking that there should be something better that I could bring back from America."

Returning to Nepal in 1992 did not immediately yield the change that Pun wanted.

"I had no idea what to do when I came back to Nepal," he says. "The only thing I had in my mind was to go around the country and see what I could do there. I spent a few months and just walked around the mountains and being a tourist in my own country. During the time I also visited my village, and the village committee was trying to find ways to upgrade the elementary school to a high school when I arrived there. I didn’t have money to donate to them, but I told them that I could teach the children."

And teach them he did. For the next four years, Pun would teach the newly-minted high school students of Himanchal High School free of charge, while at the same time starting entrepreneurship projects on the side as the school began to grow in size, and expenses began to mount.

"As the years progressed we added grades and hired more teachers, and we needed money to pay for the teachers," he says. "We started a lot of projects, like chicken farms, yam-making, beekeeping, and a lot of them failed. The things that worked were camping ground for the tourists, yak farms, a paper-making project, and a fish farm. I was involved in these many projects for several years to raise money for the school."

But it was another trip to America in 1996 that would give him the seed for the idea that would eventually win him the Ramon Magsaysay Award.

"I came back to America in 1996, where one of my professors there helped me to start the website of the village. We invited volunteers to come to the village, and it was around that time that people started helping. In 1997, we received three desktops and one laptop computer from Australia. It was only afterwards that we thought about connecting the village to the Internet, five years after I returned."

Yet, it would take another four years before that task would be accomplished. With no phone lines anywhere near the village, Pun had to run through a number of options to make his dream of connecting his small village to the rest of the world come true.

"We thought of a satellite phone, but it was too expensive. Nepal Telecom couldn’t find a way to put telephone service into the village, and that was when we finally thought of using wireless technology," he says. "This was after I wrote to the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) in 2001, asking if they knew anybody who could give me ideas to get a cheaper Internet connection to my remote village in Nepal."

That e-mail was to be turned into two articles talking about his efforts to provide his village with an Internet connection, and drew the attention of people all over the world.

"As a result of the BBC article, we had two volunteers in 2002 in the village from Belgium, who had some ideas about wireless networking," recalls Pun. "We did several experiments in 2002 with the wireless cards to test the connection between two villages, Nangi and Ramche, and the test was successful."

The network of 15 villages now has more than a dozen access points and antennas. Power is provided by solar panels, wind generators, and deep cycle gel batteries, and 14 lightning arrestors protect the equipment from the thunderstorms that frequent the area. Although Pun says that there is still a long way to go to bring the full benefit of WiFi technology to the villagers, this project is already a wish fulfilled.

Pun remains humble about his achievements, saying that all of the development happening in the villages is mainly because of the villagers themselves.

"All of these are the villagers projects, I am just there to help," he says. "These are their ideas, they have them in their minds, they just don’t know how to start them. This is where I help."

This is how Pun sees his work: As that of a volunteer and not a community leader. As such, Pun steers his projects away from any political overtone.

"There were so many political parties when I came back to Nepal the first time around, and they were eager to draft me," he says. "But what I saw is that when one political party proposes a project, it is immediately contradicted by a rival party. I would not get any work done that way. I have never aligned myself with any political party and I find that the best way to move forward. I am a social worker, a volunteer, and not a politician."

Throughout his long journey, Pun says that he has learned not just the importance of education, but that one’s education doesn’t stop once they’re outside the walls of a university.

"During the years leading to this project, I’ve failed in a lot of other endeavors," he says. "Failing is something that should not deter today’s young people. Don’t worry if you fail, because it is going to happen so many times and it is the only way you’ll learn. You just need to keep going and do what it is you want to do."