With Love from Nepal

Hanging out with Sabrina from Switzerland and Evie from Scotland--two other volunteers who spent some time in Chapagaon working at a local orphanage.

Life is pretty great right now. :)


Samyak celebrated his 10th birthday with a whole bunch of foreigners. Judging by the abnormally crazed expressions on each of our faces....poor kid. Matrika (on the far left) and Michelle (on the far right) are fourth year medical students from Australia who just arrived in Chapagaon on Wednesday.

Like a Zombie in a Narcoleptic Nation

So my official goal for this coming week is to take pictures of the dozens of sleeping Nepalis I encounter everyday. "What exactly do you mean by this?" you may be asking. Well, it seems that the Nepali people have a genuine knack for sleeping in any position, anywhere, and anytime. I have passed people stretched out for a morning nap in the road's gutter, slumped over the side of a bridge's concrete barrier, passed out against trees, sprawling in the dirt next to their livestock pen...seriously anytime and anywhere. This is one genuinely gifted narcoleptic nation, wouldn't you say?

As you may have gathered from the news, life is a bit crazy in Nepal these days with this past week's Anti-Chinese riots by hundreds of Tibetan refugees in Kathmandu. The peace rally that was actually organized by Amnesty International was crushed quite heavy-handedly by the Nepali army. Basically, Nepal is in an awkward position with Big Brother China because of China's international aid donations to Nepal. As a result, Nepal has taken a stance of harshly quelling any Anti-Chinese sentiment that arises among the refugees and others who have taken up Tibet's cause. I would really like to see so many more Olympic athletes take a firm stand against the atrocities that China is still committing in Tibet today. I understand that China has invested a great deal of money in development for the Olympics in Beijing as well as the hundreds of athletes who have been training so it would be ridiculous to assume that the Olympics could effectively be boycotted. However, I think there is no greater time to speak out against China's policy in tibet when so much attention has already been rallied for the Olympics and has the potential to raise a great deal more of awareness.

I have just under a week left of practicum and am really quite thrilled to be wrapping everything up finally. It has been a rich experience: full of growth and also moments of the slightly less than ideal circumstances. But overall, it has definitely been genuine. I'm actually going to be quite sad to leave my dear little host family clan in the silo. Sometimes I feel like I'm living with a family of Smurfs, except they're from the Twilight Zone. Sleeping in my little room in the Silo, right above Papa Smurf's Carpentry Shop where the power saws wail to life at 5 am. Papa Smurf, who wears the same red plaid lumberjack shirt every day that I've known him. He kinda reminds me of a modern-day Paul Bunyon, just a lot shorter.

It's really quite quaint though...the five daughters all sleep in the same bed, just like the seven dwarves I suppose. Except didn't the dwarves have their own log beds? I'm going to miss my oldest host son especially. He has the quite the repertoire already at age 27. He's a Hindi supermodel who has debuted in a few Bollywood films and his current passion is bodybuilding. This is evidenced when he struts into the kitchen for dinner wearing a tight strappy racerback tank top that says "BodySculpt" and is not even long enough to cover his bulging six pack of abs, with a cabby hat perfectly tweaked to the side. It's just like Ben Stiller as Zoolander just walked in. No joke. So this dashing, muscular supermodel also works as the part-time lab assistant at my clinic in Chapagaon....how would you like to give your stool sample in a cup to a Bollywood star, who resembles Derek Zoolander, to inspect for Giardia? I did. Just quite possibly the most awkward moment of my time in Nepal.

I'm going to miss hanging out on the Silo's rooftop, just me and crazy, cackling Granny. I won't exactly miss Granny's habit of sunning topless however. I think I will forever laugh about how Harrison discovered that Granny had been sneaking into his room during the daytime and snuggling into his sleeping bag while he wasn't there. It took him the longest time to figure out why his blankets were always rearranged and why someone had turned down his sleeping bag for him.

I got extremely sick again this week, but at least I know it's not Giardia right? :) Thanks to Zoolander's microscopic inspection. So my host mother, The Helga, storms into my room with six bananas and a tower of dry, white Wonderbread to help my stomach feel better. You've got to be kidding me, six bananas?! And 8 slices of dry Wonderbread? I've resorted to hiding entire loaves of leftover bread in my luggage until I find a way to properly dispose of them without angering The Helga. I've already tried to plead with her for less when I told her I was getting to fat to fit into my bridesmaid dress when I go back to the States. She just laughed and told me I was looking healthier. Gee....thanks. How many double chins constitute "healthy"?

We've been running the 3 or 4 miles to the Temple every morning where there are (counted them) 353 steps to the top. The only thing about running in my village is that you have to be on guard against squatting kids. One morning I nearly collided with a toddler who ran out into the trail in front of me and dropped his pants faster than I could almost react. Who would have thought? And why the trail? That's Nepal, right?

These three filfthy ducks are the first foul I have ever met that actually eat garbage. They live outside my host family's silo and occasionally invite themselves in to scavenge around for some dirty mud puddles to drink from.

Beautiful Patan. Just 5 miles away from my village of Chapagaon.

These children were laughing hysterically, seriously rolling on the ground laughing their hearts out. They totally made my day! Durbar Square, Patan.



Just showing off my pinkish troll hair that has persisted from last weekend's "Holy" wars.

To the following people, I am grateful to you for your contributions in making my Nepal experience truly complete in the last two weeks:

1. The child who ran full-speed into my bare shin with a prickly pineapple


2. The person who precisely aimed at the back of my leg while spitting


3. The child who decided to relieve himself on Ellie's backpack at the bus station


4. To the chef who overlooked the cockroach while cooking the restaurant's batch of lasagna


5. To the person who rehung my freshly washed laundry by removing the clothespins and then tying my clothing into knots on the clothesline.
6. To the beggar who latched onto my leg through the taxi's front window and responded to my "Paisaa chainaa!" by repeatedly beating his head against the glass, nearly breaking his nose.
7. To the friendly, chatty taxi driver who then made a rapid transformation into a raging schizophrenic when he realized his miscalculation in the distance to our village. He then threw my backpack into the dirt when we finally arrived in Chapagaon, in case I wasn't already convinced of his anger.

In the Shadow of Annapurna: Working in Phalebas

After the time that I spent working at the clinic of rural, mountainous Phalebas, I know without a doubt that I have definitely chosen a truly rewarding field of work. I've never been so certain about wanting to practice medicine as I am right now. I can't even really describe what it feels like to cast a crying child's broken arm for the first time or to listen to the sound of punctured lungs through a stethoscope. Something stirs so deeply within you at each encounter of pain. You frantically scour your brain for every possible treatment you can possibly think of and replay every case that you've learned from in the last several months, berating yourself for not learning more, faster in such a short period of time. Just trying to make the other person's pain stop quickly, completely at the mercy of your knowledge and ability to act. When you've never cared so deeply about an outcome, well, I think you have finally the discovered the path of work that you were called to.

And you should have seen the other guy... :) You know if this whole PA school/Med school thing doesn't work out for us, I think we're prime candidates for the next biggest horror flick. Today, Nepal celebrated the chaotic holiday of "Holy". The streets were literally running red from millions of water balloons filled with colored dyes and overly eager, punk Nepali teenagers bombing tourists with handfuls of powder dyes, paint, and buckets of water. After we sprinted all the way through the gauntlet and made it back to our hotel, we spent two hours washing ourselves and all of our clothes hopelessly trying to get all the ink out. Let's just say that my hair still looks like pink troll hair and I've destroyed yet another set of clothes. Happy "Holy"!

I've been looking through all the pictures on my camera trying to find the perfect picture to really portray the entire essence of all that Nepal is, thick with idiosyncracies and anomalies....and here is the picture that I believe shows it like none other. This picture is actually completely candid and I took it when I was actually snapping pictures of the women dancing at the wedding party but just happened to catch this woman in mid-spin and sporting the perfect expression that really says it all.

Most of the time the children here are irresistably adorable, but there are the occasional few that come closer to bearing likeness to "Children of the Corn". Like the ones that followed us in droves for miles as we speed-hiked back to our village, repeatedly screaming to know our names, where we lived, where we came from, what we were doing, and when exactly we were going to give them money.

She's the adorable cleaning lady at the clinic in Phalebas. Believe it or not her job description is listed as "Peon" in the clinic's annual report. Wouldn't you love to be hired on with the official job title of "Peon"? She was lovely minus the minor fact that she would enthusiastically pet my arm in a weird, awkward way. And she cleaned up all the crap that fell from the resident rat that rally raced in our bedroom's rafters every night.

Do you recognize that old woman in the middle? That's my crazy, cackling grandmother in her full electrostatic essence, folks. Sorry, just had to post another one photo of her to really capture her look.

This was our jeep ride on the way to the remote mountain village of Phalebas. The roads are so horrendous that you have to search out a jeep driver crazy enough to attempt the steep roads that nervewrackingly hug the side of a cliff and run parallel to a swift Class V rafting river.

The Descent into Madness

Hi guys! It sure has been a loooong week. As usual, I'm running completely short on time and have only a few minutes to recap a lot. There is so much more that I want to say about the current situation in Tibet for those of you who have been following it in the news. I'm not sure how much news is making it out of Tibet and into American/European news, but it really is devastating. They estimate that 80 Tibetans have died so far in the protests and 10 civilians have been burned alive since Friday. Of course they have shut down the borders and the Chinese government is putting increasing pressure on the Nepalese government to close down the mountains on the border. The reason being that the Tibetans violently protested the Chinese flag being placed on top of Everest during the Olympics' Passing of the Torch Relay. Currently, Everest is closed off to climbers and to those trekking to Everest Base Camp. This has been really devastating for the great numbers of Nepalese who own trekking companies and normally make the greatest amount of their income during this high season. This has also been extremely bad news for climbers and travelers who have already purchased climbing permits and a great deal of equipment that has been sent ahead of them to the mountains already. It will be interesting to see what befalls in the next couple of weeks.

In other news, Nepal's Constitution Assembly elections are soon approaching and the political climate in the country is getting noticeably more and more tense. I'm not really sure what to expect as far as the security situation in the weeks preceeding the election, but I'm trying to change travel plans so that I'll be as far away from Kathmandu as possible during that time. I was originally going to depart from Kathmandu on the 10th for trekking, but I think I will try to break away sooner than that for the mountains now.

Anyways, I'm going to have to leave it at that for now until I have so more time to update. Until the next time....blessings.

Yeah, it really is a picture of me dancing all by myself with the impromptu urging of a whole village attending a wedding party. I think I have truly lost all sanity.


My new village of Phalabas where I've been working at a very small, but impressively equipped community health clinic established by Helping Hands International.

We met a fantastically hilarious couple of Brits during my second day of paragliding...we laughed for hours that night.


That's a goat riding the same bus as me.

2 months in and still smiling....most of the time...

Chasing the G-Force in Nepal

The kids who packed our chutes for us for 5 rupees

Lake Phewa

We also biked out to some underground waterfalls a couple of miles outside of Pokhara.

From the Jungle to the Himal

This was Ellie's and my last night in Thamel before we left town for Chitwan National Park and Pokhara for vacation/our new work assignment. Harrison, a Canadian from Nova Scotia, is also living in Chapagaon and working as a volunteer in Nepal for a couple of months. We've knocked out a couple of amazing morning runs in the last week: the first was a couple of miles out to the Santaneshor Temple that sits atop a hill with 300 steps to the top and the second was to the medieval-looking village of Godavari where there is a giant golden Buddha in the forest.

I have a hilarious video clip of this jungle walk in Chitwan National Park with our guide and his warnings about rhinos. I'll try to get it posted when I'm back in Kathmandu and have faster internet. You'll have to click on these photos to make them larger, I uploaded them in the small size in order to save time. It's really funny how tall I am in Nepal compared to most Nepali women. I'm trying to make myself shorter in this photo to fit in. We met this Nepali girl who was also on vacation and staying at our bungalow in Chitwan. She was really excited to get a picture with us and our guide. She also thought I was from Sweden. :)

We had an incredible early morning of canoeing in a dug-out wooden canoe down the river. We spotted several crocodiles napping in the river as we paddled by. That made it a bit more adventurous :)

This is perhaps one of my greatest memories in Nepal...taking a bath in the river with one of the elephants. We were drenched with trunkfuls of river water.

You can't really tell in this picture, but the elephant let me climb up his trunk and lifted me onto his head. So amazing to get to play with the elephants in the water.


We met a couple of medical students from Germany our first night in Pokhara, Alex and Jannine. They were also volunteers in a small village in Nepal for about 5 weeks.

This was taken right after we landed from paragliding today. Hopefully I'll get some more of the actual sky shots posted in the next day or so.

Sorry for a bit of a hiatus in the blog, the internet hasn't been very handy to access and runs extremely slow in this isolated region of Nepal. However, the lack of internet has not detracted at all from what I would have to call some of the most amazing vistas and experiences of my lifetime. Today four of us from the US, Germany, and Austria jumped in a microbus bound for the insane pinnacle of Sarangkot that serves as quite possibly one of the most dramatic launching pads for paragliding in the world. Sarangkot boasts the most incredible views of the Himal that I have ever seen. The idea of launching off a sheer face while dangling from a parachute in the shadow of the Himal makes you feel pretty insignificant real fast. The clouds rolled in right about the time that we took off and obscured our views a bit, but the thermals were phenomenal. I can't even predict how many meters of lift we got this afternoon, but I've definitely never been that high even with Dad's powered parachute. We circled over Lake Phewa (Phewa Tal) for about half an hour and zipped past cliffside villages. At the very end of the flight, my pilot asked me if I wanted to do some acrobatics. I thought about it for less than a second and immediately agreed to some wing-overs and 360s over the lake. I can't even describe the amount of force on my body as we swung in steep pendulums and then whipped into a tight spiral down to the ground. I completely lost my voice and couldn't even scream out of sheer exhilaration. It was incredible! As soon as we got back to the office, I signed up for cross-country and acrobatic paragliding tomorrow morning, hopefully while the views are still spectacular and before the afternoon clouds move in.