Village Stay

I am now back in Kathmandu, after my 2-week village stay. Village stay is part of the Language and Cultural Orientation Program that I have been doing here in Kathmandu. It's meant to be a language and cultural immersion experience - a chance to see what life is like outside the city. Certainly most of the patients I will be caring for in Tansen will come from more rural settings, rather than a big city, so it is good to get some exposure to a context that is a bit more like theirs.

When I heard about the village stay, I was picturing being out in the middle of nowhere, in little mud huts (or something similar) with no running water or electricity, or even toilets. I was picturing bathing outdoors at a public tap, going with the women in the morning to fetch water from the river, that sort of thing. While that would have made for a good story, I'm quite thankful that it WASN'T like that. The village we (there were 3 of us who went) stayed in was about a 45 minute walk from the outskirts of Pokhara, which is a fairly major tourist city about 6-7 hrs from Kathmandu. It was rural, for sure, but we weren't really roughing it. Homes were cement homes (and even the "traditional Nepali home" that my language teacher pointed out had a "traditional Nepali solar panel" on the top of it!). There was electricity...or at least, as much electricity as there is anywhere in Nepal, where "load-shedding" (i.e. no electricity) happens many hours every day, according to a fixed schedule. The home where I was staying also had running water and an indoor toilet and shower area - woohoo! It was a squat toilet, but that's not too big a deal, at least when you're healthy. Thankfully NONE of us got sick while we were there - big thanks to God for that blessing! That would not have been fun.

The home where I was staying had a family of 6 living there...the mother and father, their 3 children (2 daughters, aged 20 and 18), and a son around age 15. The oldest daughter is married and has a 2-year old daughter, who also lives there. Her husband lives elsewhere in Nepal for work. This is a very common situation in Nepal...husbands and wives living apart and maybe only seeing each other a few times a year - IF that! If they live in other countries (which is also very common) they might only see each other once every few years. I can't imagine!! The family was very welcoming and hospitable. They've had other bideshis stay there in the past, so they were kind of used to some of the differences between Nepali and western culture, which was helpful. We communicated almost exclusively in Nepali, though occasionally the younger daughter spoke English with me. It was really good, at this stage of my language learning, to be forced to communicate in Nepali for an extended period of time...really helped my comfort level and fluency with the language that I do have at this point.

The daily schedule went something like this:

7 am (ish) - someone from the family would bring me a cup of tea and sometimes also some biscuits.

7-9 (ish) - I would get dressed, sometimes shower (okay, not shower, really...the water was WAY too cold to shower - I would run the water just enough to get wet and clean and to wash my hair without getting completely under the running water), sometimes do some laundry by hand, sometimes help make the morning daal bhat, sometimes sit around and read or play my guitar, which I had felt silly bringing, but was so glad I brought.

9 or 9:30ish - Time for morning daal bhat (rice and lentil soup with some kind of side dish of curried vegetables). This is the classic meal for Nepalis, and they eat it twice a day (morning and evening). These are usually the only 2 meals Nepalis eat in a day, and the amount of rice they can consume is astonishing! They are always shocked when bideshis don't even eat half the amount that they eat, and it's a bit of a delicate balance between not eating so much that you feel sick, but also not offending them by not eating enough (or making them worry that you're going hungry). The family sits on the kitchen floor to eat and eats with their hands. I did that the first day, and then I think they noticed I was very fidgety and having a hard time on the floor, and so from then on they had me sit on a little stool and put my plate on a chair to use as a table. And when I burned my fingers from trying to eat with my hands, they graciously gave me a spoon! There would also be buffalo milk (freshly obtained from the buffalo they had, and then boiled prior to serving) that they'd give me, and we'd pour it over the daal bhat.

10-1 - Nepali lesson - we had 2 teachers come in from Pokhara. I had lessons together with one of the other people who came for the village stay, since we're at a very similar point in our studies. We did the usual Nepali studying (grammar, vocab, etc), and also did some village-related learning. We took a visit to the local health post one day, and to a mushroom farm another day. A couple times he also took us around to people's homes. For each little "field trip" we had to ask questions we'd prepared and talk with the people there about village life, health issues, mushroom farming, whatever the topic happened to be for the day.

1-3 - Sometimes I napped, sometimes hung out with the family. Somewhere in there there was kajaa (snack, which really was lunch for us) - sometimes roti (flat bread), sometimes popcorn, sometimes biscuits, sometimes instant noodles, or other things.

3-7 - The 3 of us would usually go exploring, either on our own, or with some of the kids from the village. One day a couple of the village boys took us to a bat cave...which was kind of fun. Other times we just wandered around and compared notes about how things were going. Usually sometime around 5 we'd go back to our respective homes and I'd usually help with evening chores and daal bhat making.

7 pm - Evening daal bhat time. Same drill as for the morning meal.

Bedtime came early most nights, because there was almost never electricity in the evenings. That was fine with me. I was asleep before 9:00 most night!

It was a good experience, overall. Even though we weren't really roughing it, it was still a cultural and language immersion time, and it was rural. Most people were farmers, and they had crops and animals, and we learned a little bit about rural life in Nepal and what's involved in it all. The highlight for me, I think, was the fact that there was a 2-year-old in the house. She was scared of me at first, but we became good friends, and she was a real cutie. I do have a soft spot for little ones, I must say!

So now I'm back in Kathmandu, and have one more month of language study before I move to Tansen. Moving date is May 1, which is a couple weeks later than originally planned, but I'm glad for one month of "normal" life before I transition, since the last couple months have been a bit crazy.

On another note, Paul and I are doing our best to stay in touch as much as we can. It's a challenge being apart, especially when phone calls are super-expensive and the connection is unreliable. He's just this week gotten internet up and running, and so theoretically we can talk on Skype, but so far it's been quite hit-and-miss, as well. Please keep praying for us in that regard. We'll sure be glad when we're not oceans apart anymore!

Developments...

I just got back from a week-long visit to Tansen for a work orientation. It was great to finally see the place and to meet the people I'll be working with in a couple months. It's a 10-hour bus ride to get there, which is why I haven't visited until now. The hospital has a vehicle, known as the Buck (half bus, half truck) that travels once a week between Kathmandu and Tansen. We took the Buck there and then flew back (the closest airport is about 1 1/2 hours from Tansen along a very windy mountain road that makes you motion sick pretty quickly). After having been there and seen how beautiful it is (SO much nicer than dirty, noisy, smelly Kathmandu!), and spent a bit of time in the hospital, I'm starting to get excited about moving there and starting work. There will definitely be a steep learning curve at the beginning, but that is to be expected. Burns are very common there and all but the most superficial burns usually require some form of surgical intervention. In Canada this is usually done by plastic surgeons, but there is no plastic surgery department at Tansen. What else did I see during my one day of rounds? There was a baby a few days old with spina bifida and an open spinal cord defect (probably not much that can be done for her, but the surgical team is caring for the wound for the time being). There were a few people with TB-related pleural effusions (fluid around the lungs) requiring chest tube drainage. There was a guy with alcoholic cirrhosis (alcohol abuse is a big problem here) with badly infected fluid in his belly...not too much that can be done for him here. There was the usual mix of gallbladders, hernias, appendixes, and other more "typical" general surgery cases.

I was interested to find out that the hospital does have mesh that they can use to repair hernias with. It's expensive so it's used sparingly, but it's good that they have it. That's the gold standard for most hernia repairs in the west, but I wasn't expecting to have that option here. There is a laparoscopic set-up, as well. It's pretty basic, and the picture quality isn't great...but hey, at least they have something. They do try to do their gallbladders laparoscopically if they can, which is great...both for the patients (when it is successful) and for someone like me who wants to keep up her laparoscopic skills if possible. I helped another surgeon with a gallbladder the other day. We started laparoscopically, but it was a pretty inflamed gallbladder, and we were both visiting surgeons and weren't too familiar with the equipment, etc, so we ended up converting to an open procedure, which was the safest thing to do at that point.

Tansen is right in the Himalayan foothills, and the town itself is built into the side of a fairly steep hill. You are almost never walking on level ground. Water supply is a huge problem, and so people walk quite a distance with buckets to get the water they need for daily life. It's less of a problem on the hospital compound, but you still have to use water sparingly.

In other (more important) news, as many of you already know, I have recently gotten engaged to be married to a guy named Paul!! No, we didn't meet in Nepal - we've actually been friends for 8 years now, but it's taken this long for the relationship to develop into more. He was just here for a visit (during which we got engaged on a little 18-seater plane, right in front of Mount Everest!), and he was able to come and see Tansen with me, which is great, since he will also be living there after we get married. We also had a chance to spend a weekend at the children's home, where all the kids have already started calling him the Nepali word for "Brother-in-law" (older sister's husband, to be precise). They were all very excited to meet him, and we had a wonderful weekend there. He is off to Africa now for 6 months (sigh) to finish up a building project there. We plan to get married in Canada in October, and then come back to Nepal together as a couple in December. We're very happy (obviously), and everyone - both here in Nepal and back home - has been so great and supportive. People here are excited to have us in Tansen as a couple, and he had a chance to meet some people he may end up working with when he comes back. These next 6 months will be challenging for us, especially since a long-distance relationship between Nepal and Africa isn't the most straight-forward. We're just praying for good phone networks and internet connections so that we can stay in touch as best we can. We did manage to plan the majority of our wedding while we were together, so that was a bonus!

I'm off on Friday to Pokhara (a tourist town about 5-6 hours from here) for a weekend of touristy things with a couple other language students. Then on Monday we head to the village for our 2-week village stay. I don't expect to have internet access there...or showers, for that matter!