Namaste from Nepal

Namaste. And welcome to Nepal.

I have been given the great privledge of traveling to this beautiful, culturally diverse and wonderful country to offer my limited services in medical clinics in the Kathmandu area. For those of you curious about this foreign country and culture, I'll do my best to pass on my tiny but growing knowledge of this absolutely amazing country. My journey started in Kathmandu on a dark and exhausting night...

After almost 48 hours of traveling and no sleep, I touched down in the Kathmandu airport. A representative from Projects Abroad (the organization I am traveling and volunteering through) greeted me at the gate and took me through a maze of windy, bumpy brick streets and dropped me at my motel at 12:30am. My first impression of Nepal was not a good one, the streets looked tiny, broken, dark and trashy.

Luckily, the next morning, the streets exploded with color and energy and life. Colorful posters and signs dangled from rooftops and colorful clothes and purses and trinkets spilled into the narrow streets from their nighttime barracades. People and motorbikes and cars fought for space on the roads. Heaps of trash were piled everywhere. Mangy dogs scratched their furless ears. This place was incredible.

After a few days in an area of Kathmandu called Thamel (generally considered the "tourist" area) myself and a couple other new volunteers headed out in vans to our placements in the country. I found myself at a very tiny and run down hospital called Dr. Iwomura Memorial Hospital. This is located in a town called Bhaktapur. Here, I would start offering my services in these dirty halls, filled with flies and sick Nepalis.

The hospital is exactly what one would expect in a third world country. The beds are hardly clean, the windows are open to keep it cool but the flies get in as a tradeoff and land on the lifeless hands and faces of shriveled women curled in balls and heavyset men sinking into their beds who are too sick or in too much pain to notice. The nurses wear flip flops and no gloves. Everything that can be is used and reused and reused again. And everyone is speaking Nepali around me.

Luckily, I can escape to my homestay. It is a 35 minute, sometimes more, bus ride away to a town called Banepa. When the buses are full and crowded, we are allowed to sit on the top, on tiny metal racks that is not intended to carry people at all and you have to hold onto to keep from falling off. The bus flies around windy mountain roads and since there are no "lanes" on Nepali roads, we are constantly staring at a bus of equal size and equal speed clamboring head on at us before narrowly swerving back to the left side. Exciting, and exhillerating, especially as you look around you and see the beautiful green of the hillsides and people working in crops and the color and life of the country-side. I fall in love with the country again every time I take this bus ride.

My homestay, like I said, is in Banepa. Here I stay with a kind man named Lok who owns a rice factory. He hosts 9 or so other volunteers, and we are each given a large room with bed and a lock of our own. We all return from work, shower (since this is the only time the shower water might be warm, it is solar heated on the roof. ANY, and I mean ANY, other time, it will be cold) and then sit down, normally by candlelight (since there are rolling blackouts and we have no power for most hours of the day) to eat and talk the rest of the night. We have a wonderful rooftop that we hang out on together if we have freetime. It is perfect for tanning and reading during the day and drinking at night...none of which we really have much time for anyway.

Our days start at 5:30 for morning walks in the hills or yoga and normally ends at about 9 at night. It is the Nepali way to rise and set with the sun, as they don't have power and its a dark world when the sun goes down. It is a good and simple life we live, but entirely fulfilling, for the timebeing, at least. The other volunteers are from all over the world: Switzerland, Holland, Ireland, Israel, England, Wales, Canada and one other American besides myself. They are all around my age, and very interesting, laid back, intelligent and fun people. I guess that Nepal in general attracts these kinds of travelers (not trying to categorize myself in there).