Blogs from Kathmandu, Nepal, Asia - page 19

Happy Canada Day! Unfortunately, we're not in Canada to celebrate our nation's birthday. This morning Elysia spent the morning at the hospital and came back to spend the afternoon with Mike. Today our friend Katie was leaving to continue on her travels, so we said goodbye to her at breakfast. Then Elysia spent the rest of the morning at the hospital learning more about medicine in Nepal. There wasn't anything too exciting today. She just stuck around the outpatient clinic and made funny faces to make the children laugh when they cried. The one interesting patient was a little baby in the ICU. This is a sad story though, because the baby a few days earlier had been on a ventilator, which is very bad news in Nepal. Being on a ventilator is expensive for the ... read more

Our first impression of Kathmandu, not nearly as brown or hot as India. At an altitude of 4500 ft, the air is noticeably cooler, thinner and less hazy than Delhi. Trash still litters the roads, but not nearly to the same extent as in India. Clothing styles are decidedly more western than in India as well, although there are still a considerable amount of women in the local garb. Kathmandu is a city of 4 million people, relatively small by India standards, with the vast majority recently settling here. Our guide in Kathmandu, Kasey(sp), was another master’s degree educated, anthropology trained local. He shared a wealth of knowledge about the culture, the politics and the history of Nepal. I wish I could remember more. Leo and I came here with just a bit more than a ... read more

Today Mike got to Kathmandu hooray! I spent the morning at the hospital doing some more shadowing and working on our project that we now realize is not very feasible (very hard to measure the effect of hand washing on hospital infections when the hand washing program has already been started and there are few patients). Anyways, after some time at the hospital I went back to Thamel to prepare for Mike's arrival. I got him a SIM card (it's a big deal to get-- you have to give them a copy of your passport, a passport photo and your thumb prints! It seems like overkill!) and cleaned up the room a bit. I had to take a fan from one of my classmates who's here, Graham's, room because it's really hot here for Mike. It ... read more

Elysia: My body couldn't stand to lie in bed a moment longer, and I was feeling a bit better (not perfect though), but I decided to get out and went shopping in Thamel with Katie. I didn't want to take my chances going to the hospital in case I felt sick and had to make my long, hot and bumpy way back by taxi again. So off we went shopping. Katie was looking for some souvenirs and we were also searching for some nice jewellery. It's hard to know what kind of quality you're buying. Because its off season here, the stores are not getting as many customers, so it's easy to get a good bargain out of them. We looked for necklaces in a few stores but finally found a store that looked like it ... read more

Today I spent most of the day around the hospital. In the afternoon we went across the street to a paint store to buy paints for the mural we're going to paint at IFCH. We will be painting Deluxe Cabin 1 (the one I stayed in the first night), and we decided on a Disney theme since Erik is a good artist and can draw. We settled on Beauty and the Beast, the Lion King and Aladdin themes. We're going to attempt to paint tomorrow. Just like everything in nepal, it took a long time to get the paint. It was funny because as we were waiting for paint, someone from the apartments above decided to dump a bucket of something that was like cement out of the window. Erik was very fortunate to be holding ... read more