SARIC Rising Tide

52 DE K I WANGMO BHUTAN THE SUM OF OUR ACCOMPLISHMENTS 53 the sum of our accomplishments I wanted to learn and I had a wonderful science teacher who was my inspiration. I also had great role models in my family. My father was a mechanical engineer and he guided my brothers and myself in our choice of career.” H ow far would you travel to get an education? For DekiWangmo in Bhutan, it was a five-kilometer walk each way, in the remote regions of eastern Bhutan. “It was a hunger for knowledge,” she says as she looks back on a time when she would shepherd her younger siblings to school at Nganglam, all while avoiding the occasional landslide. Since her school only went through to the eighth grade, Deki would move across Bhutan to complete her education before following her father’s footsteps into engineering. “He was thrilled when I got my diploma and more so when I was employed by the country’s biggest hydroelectric project at that time, in Tala.” Harnessing the power of the Wangchu river, the 1020mW Tala Hydroelectric Project was developed in collaboration with India. Deki was tasked with the store division for electrical distribution, and played a crucial role in its successful commissioning in 2007. “I workedwith three other Indian colleagues andwas at Tala for over two years. As a new engineer I found this job both challenging and very satisfying. The 400kV Malabase substation was my next post, as the shift in charge for operations and maintenance. That was before I moved and spent 15 years as head of the 132kV Gelephu substation—overseeing power supply for the entire Sarpang district and facilitating the evacuation of excess power from the eastern grid to India, through Bongaigaon.”