Happy Tihar 2068

The year is 2068.

(They use Buddha for their calendar, not JC)

This week is the Nepalese festival of lights, Tihar, also called Diwali in India.

Each day celebrates a different creature - crow, cow, dog, bull, and brother - and all week every storefront is festooned with long strings of lights. As I write this, I can hear fireworks popping off nearby.

Here are a couple pictures to give you an idea of the festival: (1) The decorations at home; (2) The supermarket at night; (3) Jimi on Kukur Puja (Dog Day)

Life is normally pretty slow in Kathmandu and during Tihar it crawls, so I'm going to take a couple days off from the hospital. I'll be spending the rest of the week at Chitwan National Park, where I'll be riding elephants, canoeing with crocs, and searching for the elusive Bengal tiger. According to Wikipedia, Chitwan is quite safe - only 13 people have been eaten by tigers in the past 30 years.

We, the volunteers, only have one caretaker now. Many of my little sisters left today to join a group of doctors and dentists on a medical trek. Now it's just me, Annie (the Alaskan volunteering at an orphanage), Michelle (the American sportscaster from Abu Dhabi), Inder (the Canuck who works with me and has a fondness for "brewskies") and Will (the motivational speaker who has been to every continent - Antarctica twice).

I have to start packing for tomorrow; we leave dark and early for the seven hour bus ride.

Lesson learned: How to draw blood and open IVs, pretty useful ey?

Nepalese Knives & Psychic Surgeons

[x-post from facebook]

This is a kukri.

It is a knife carried by the legendary Nepalese warriors called Gurkhas. The Gurkha were recognized by the British Army as a "martial race," known for their fighting ability, endurance, and valor. Several military branches around the world have Gurkha Brigades to this day. It was once said, "If a man says he is not afraid of dying, he is either lying or is a Gurkha."

Anyway, a guy came in this morning after getting stabbed in the neck with one of these.

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Here's something you don't see everyday:

I'm walking home from the hospital and I spot about 50 people crowded in a circle just off the main road. So, I peek over their heads to see what's up, and there's a guy kneeling next to a blanket with a pair of legs sticking out (presumably with a torso attached). The guy is clearly a showman, talking excitedly to the crowd, and then he sticks his head under the blanket and comes out with hands soaked in blood, holding an organ or something, to wild applause.

It was psychic surgery.

This is something I'd only heard about in the parapsychology unit of my high school psych class.

And The X-Files of course.

Canadian Thanksgiving

My first full day here was spent visiting the popular tourist destinations around Kathmandu. Shanti and her sister - thankfully "brother" or "sister" is an appropriate form of address if I forget anyone's name, which I do readily - showed me around Buddhapark, Thamel, and Swayambhunath. Buddhapark is home to a 2000-year-old statue of the Enlightened One that rises an impressive 70 feet high. From there we hiked up to Swayamabhunath, commonly known as the Monkey Temple for reasons that soon became obvious.

Suddenly, there's monkeys. Everywhere.

Whole families of small, orange monkeys marched single file past the wandering tourists, sprang from tree to tree, and fought over scraps of "food" and the occasional plastic water bottle. I can't describe the feeling of looking into the faces of these tiny primates. There was some element of savagery, to be sure, but also the strangest sense of familiarity - like I was staring at a distant cousin whom I'd never seen before.

The top of the Monkey Temple afforded the most incredible view of the city, and as we marched back down the hill I caught sight of a swimming pool designated "Monkey Only." Apparently segregation is still an issue in this part of the world. We pressed on to Thamel, the backpacker's district and home to all of the nightclubs and souvenir shops. I wasn't very impressed with the place (but I would have a more memorable experience a few days later).

The next day, Shanti and I walked two miles to the Helping Hands Hospital, one of the most unusual places I've ever been. I could describe the place as a sort of hole-in-the-wall, community hospital with 100 beds and every specialty represented, from orthopedics to neurosurgery. But that would not do it justice. It is literally a drive-thru hospital, with doctors and employees riding their motorbikes past the patients waiting to be seen. At the center of everything is a corral of dozens of human-sized oxygen tanks, so large that each one requires a security guard to act as a porter - a pretty funny sight to see trailing a huddled, elderly woman. And nobody bats an eye when the hospital loses electricity, which it does at least five times a day.

I assigned myself to the emergency department, already being familiar with it and deciding that's where the action was. My first day, I removed some skin staples and assisted with an I&D and wound packing. That night, I rode home on the back of a doctor's motorcycle. The next day I put in my first sutures, in a young woman who cut her foot open on a piece of glass. Human flesh is much harder to stitch together than the banana peels I'd been practicing on. Today I performed an EKG on myself (healthy as a horse, if you were wondering).

During the slow times, which there are several a day, I hand out lollipops to the little kids roaming the hospital and I read from the fourth edition of the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine. I was expecting the text to contain a litany of anatomical and pharmaceutical references, which it does, but I was surprised to find the first few chapters dedicated to medicine as an art. The discussions of ethics, of handling the pressures of work, of the limits of "mere mortals," and of Nature and death, were truly poetic. To give you a taste, the authors describe death as "Nature's great master-stroke, although cruel to us individuals," because without it the beautiful and varied expressions of DNA would not get their opportunity to arise. We belong to our genes, not the other way around, and every so often the slate must be wiped clean to give life the chance at a fresh start. Maybe this is close to what Buddhists have in mind when they talk about reincarnation. Heavy shit.

My journey thus far hasn't been entirely spiritual. For a couple days, the hostel housed a pair of trekkers from Germany who had already done their volunteering before going to the Himalayas. Jan, Sebastian, and I met up in Thamel with two other German trekkers and a Nepalese medical student, and we all connected over the timeless foundations of male camaraderie - beer, women, and The Godfather. Using the excuse that it was Canadian Thanksgiving, we hit the pubs and the dance clubs and before we knew it we were playing roulette at a nearby Indian casino (not that kind of Indian).

Fast forward to closing time and we were presented with any number of taxis offering a suitable ride home. For some reason, we chose the single rickshaw of the lot. The driver begged to take us the ludicrous distance of four miles home for 100 rupees, which is about $1.28. A few minutes into the ride, we started to sympathize with the driver and we decided to take turns pulling the rickshaw. With three passengers and one driver in tow, this requires backbreaking effort. Even more so when done on half of a bicycle that is older than I am. We made it about a mile before a wild telephone pole appeared on the side of the road, pulling Jan in like a magnet. Everything was chaos at 8 miles per hour and we watched in slow-motion as the carriage flipped completely upside down. Luckily we were mostly intact, though the technology in our pockets was not as fortunate. We traded apologies with the driver, who set off rattled but with his fare and a few extra pennies. After an hour searching for a camera that seemed to vaporize during the crash, we managed to catch a taxi and make it home. Of course, everything was locked so we had to stand on each other's shoulders and climb in through an open window. Jan and Sebastian left for Germany the following day.

That's enough for one night. I'm meeting up with some of the doctors and other volunteers for dinner soon, and then it's straight to bed for me.

Lesson learned: Don't drink and drive rickshaw.

Monkeys on the Runway

Thai Airways is maybe the only way to fly. Free booze makes a 17 hour flight feel like a scant 8 hours, and their Singha beer is pretty damn good. The chairs were equipped with interactive monitors, allowing the modern traveler to alternate between playing Pokemon and learning enough Thai to tell the stewardesses that he loves them.

The orange monkeys were the first thing I noticed upon arriving in Kathmandu. Three of them were just chilling on the tarmac, oblivious of the massive Airbus that had just landed nearby. The smell in the air was reminiscent of tea leaves and car exhaust, but all I noticed were the foothills surrounding the city, vast and untouched.

Shanti, my diminutive 20-year-old hostess, found me circling the airport with half a dozen panhandlers in tow. Our taxi was the sorriest excuse for an automobile I've ever seen, but it was equipped with a working horn. They drive on the left lane here, but "lane" is perhaps too strong a word. If there was a gap in oncoming traffic, the cars and scooters would line up quadruple file, defying death to pass each other. We drove by the Helping Hands Hospital where I'll be working. It had the architecture of a film store.

The hostel is very spacious, has wi-fi and hot water, and looks nothing like the other ramshackle huts around it. There is a tiny dog here named Jimi who climbs trees and will stop at nothing to hump my leg. I've heard about other volunteers but haven't seen any yet. I took a trip to the supermarket (read Wal-Mart) next door where I got a new wristwatch, some Armani jeans, and the one bag of garlic not filled with roaches - all for 10 bucks!

Tomorrow is the appointed sightseeing day. I'm hoping for more monkeys.

Lesson learned: Designer knockoffs are much cheaper than the real thing.

China is Strict

Off to a good start, major crisis averted. I almost flew to China without a travel visa - which I was told I wouldn't need - and they would have deported me back to the US.

After much airline drama, I'm rerouted through Bangkok to Kathmandu.

Lesson learned: Show up 12 hours before an international flight.