The image of yourself with the Hillary bronze statue at the school is very nice...this article from this Sunday's newspaper. Hope that much is well and that your cold is clearing up. WP

Sir Edmund Hillary didn't much like being called "Sir Edmund Hillary."

"Call me Ed," he'd always say, with a roll of his eyes that suggested that even after all these years, he still thought the whole knighthood thing a bit much.

His many Bay Area friends - mountaineers, adventurers, philanthropists - got together recently at an event hosted by financier Richard Blum to raise a glass to the man we all called "Ed." What may surprise you is that the reason he was so beloved and admired by this group, and by those all over the world who knew him, had very little to do with his having climbed Mount Everest.

For Ed, the summit was just a steppingstone to more important things. But the thing he was most proud of in his life was given short shrift in the obituaries following his death in January, at the age of 88. I intend to correct that here.

As I've written before, it was one of the happier accidents of history that of all the people who might have been first to plant their footprints on the planet's highest point, it fell to Ed and his partner, Sherpa Tenzing Norgay.

Both quickly grasped something most travelers eventually come to understand: It's not enough, as the saying goes, to take only photos and leave only footprints. We've also got to give something back to the people who touch our lives.

Tenzing set up a school to give his fellow Sherpas the skills and training they'd need to survive this most deadly of professions. Ed also recognized his enormous debt to the Nepalese mountain people who helped him to the top, and he spent the rest of his days working tirelessly to improve their lives in other ways.

In 1960, Ed was back in the Everest region, hiking with his Sherpa friends, when he asked them: "If there is anything I can do for the Sherpa people, what do you think that would be?"

As Ed later recounted in his book "Schoolhouse in the Clouds," one of his friends replied, "Our children have eyes, but they are blind and cannot see. We want you to open their eyes by building a school in our village."

The New Zealander went back the following year with his wife and kids, and with his brother, Rex, a contractor, and built a one-room school in the village of Khumjung, complete with an old oxygen cylinder as the bell. It was an immediate success, and Ed went on to become virtually a one-man Peace Corps, eventually supervising the construction of nearly 30 schools, a couple of hospitals and a handful of medical clinics in the region.

Given access to formal education for the first time in their lives, the Sherpas - many of whom lived in medieval conditions, without electricity or indoor plumbing, a week's walk from the nearest road - rocketed into the modern world, becoming dentists, airline pilots and Wall Street traders.

"If you wanted to know about global assistance to the poor, you didn't talk to the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank," said Blum at the gathering. "You talked to Ed. Village by village, school by school, hospital by hospital - this practical approach of small projects, it all came from Ed."

Twenty-five years ago, Blum partnered with his friend, founding the American Himalayan Foundation to raise money in the United States for Ed's work, and to build a large network of its own projects throughout Nepal and Tibet. Today it operates schools that educate more than 4,000 children a year, runs 30 hospitals and clinics, restores ancient monasteries, supports Tibetan refugee camps and even helps subsidize the world's highest dental clinic.

Sixty percent of its $4 million annual operating budget comes from donors in the Bay Area.

Ed was a frequent figure at AHF benefits in San Francisco, telling the story of his ascent year after year to raise money for schools and hospitals, even after he was too old and frail to stand upright onstage. In private, though, he was clearly bored with his old Everest exploits. What really motivated him, he said, was the education and medical care of the Sherpas.

"That's much more important than walking up a mountain, don't you think?" he once told me.

If the idea of building schools for the impoverished peoples of the Himalayas sounds a little familiar, it might be because Ed's work was the inspiration for Greg Mortenson, whose story is told in the best-seller "Three Cups of Tea." Mortenson, a former UCSF emergency room nurse, has built nearly 60 schools in the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and he based his organization on the work Ed has done with the Sherpas of Nepal.

Among those gathering recently to honor Hillary was Norbu Tenzing Norgay, 45, the eldest son of Tenzing Norgay. He now lives in San Francisco, where he helps run the American Himalayan Foundation.

"What Ed has done has affected the lives of two generations of Sherpas," he said. "He was the single driving force behind the development of a whole ethnic group, and he did it in a very simple way.

"That's why we loved Ed."

John Flinn is executive editor of Travel. To comment, visit sfgate.com/travel.

Watching your climb with interest. All the best, love Derek and Pat
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