WIf only that last dangerous flight wouldn’t always be until she’s in the western mountains of Nepal, on the border with Tibet. Stella Deetjen shakes her head with a shudder, her blond dreadlocks flying. Over tea in her home town of Friedrichsdorf im Taunus, the development worker reports on the last six months in the Mugu region and how nerve-wracking the start in May was.

No sooner had they landed with the Twin Otter on the mountain runway in Bajura than the news came from the lowlands: Tara Air 9N-AET flew against a cloud-covered wall of Manapathi (6380 meters), in the wreck at a good 4000 meters altitude 22 people died. She still had a vomit bag from the plane she had been on almost 48 hours earlier in her pocket.

Tara Air planes are outdated, since 1997 74 people have died on the main Pokhara-Jomsom route. But “Back to Life”, as Deetjen called her aid organization 25 years ago, does not come to the people in Mugu overland.

The region is one and a half times the size of Saarland and has 65,000 inhabitants. The slopes for the vehicles are lost when you really go into the mountains. The little horses that Stella Deetjen had to ride this time because of a knee injury were not her thing: they ran stubbornly on the side of the abyss, she says, only half jokingly.

Early 20s, alone, with a backpack

Stella Deetjen has seen the horsemen of the apocalypse and found happiness in life since she met a leper on the stairs to the Ganges in Varanasi (Benares, India) and knew that she had to stay and help. “I was in my early 20s and backpacking alone. After my trip, a place to study photography at a design school in Rome was waiting for me,” writes Deetjen in her book “Untouchable”, in which she talks about the years among the leprous beggars, about the street clinic she built there, about the protection for the most vulnerable in an inexorable caste system.

She has been working in Nepal since 2009. After a small beginning, “Back to Life” has become a veritable aid organization, now with 89 employees in the country on the Himalayas and five in the Bad Homburg headquarters. When she stood for the first time in the mountain village of Loharbada and saw how the women of Mugus had to leave the house to give birth and give birth to the cow in the pit, alone, without any assistance, she knew that she would fight against the rock-old taboo: The woman who gives birth is unclean, and if she is not separated from the community, the vengeance of the mountain gods will bring disaster to man, cattle and crops.

Stella Deetjen won the women’s friendship. She won the trust of the men, who saw with their own eyes how their village was progressing, how beneficial the stoves are, for example, which Deetjen had amazingly tough porters carry up to the village over the last few kilometers. Now the women no longer have to cook and heat with an open fire, the smoke comes out of the roof and does not settle on the lungs of the sleeping people. Small solar systems provide light when the mountain night falls, outhouses allow the droppings to be removed from the paths in the village. 38 percent of all households in Mugu now have such systems, and 148 kilometers of water pipes have been laid.

The men in Loharbada opened up when Stella Deetjen and her Nepalese leaders Achyut Paudel and Dikendra Dhakal spoke to them about the unnameable, the cowshed births. In the end, the village elders broke the taboo and dared to do something fundamentally new, a birthplace for women. In the meantime, “Back to Life” has built 15 such houses. The villagers work with us, “helping people to help themselves” shouldn’t remain a catchphrase. Two midwives each look after the pregnant women and those giving birth.