Advertisement
Published: June 17th 2008
Oh geez, I don't even know where to start with this entry. I just got back from an amazing week in a village called Phalebas. It was quite the fiasco trying to get there: 2 hour bus ride to Kathmandu, 7 hour bus ride to Pokhara, but then there was something up with a bridge being closed, so we had to spend the night in Pokhara. After a three hour bus ride to Kusma, we then had a 3 1/2 hour hike up two small mountains to get to the village.
Phalebas looks like a cross between Austria from the 'Sound of Music' and the Shire from 'Lord of the Rings.' It's so gorgeous - everything is green, blue, and orangey-brown. The clouds often hang low over the mountains, and there are flowering trees everywhere.
I went with Esther, a girl from California, and we had so much fun. The people at the health clinic and in the village were SO welcoming that it was a bit overwhelming at times. We slept in a room at the clinic under blue mosquito nets and took our meals on the other side of a cornfield at the house of the clinic's
accountant. They insisted that we call them Kaka and Kaki (Uncle and Aunt), and they were so sweet. Kaki made some delicious daal bhaat, and Kaka showed us how to milk a water buffalo. Kumar, the community medical auxiliary at the clinic, helped us kill the enormous spiders (we're talking tarantula-sized!) and loved video taping our every move.
We were treated like doctors, even though we repeatedly told them we weren't. We shied away from giving injections and setting up IVs, but I did agree to remove stitches from a man's leg after a horrific fall, and Esther and I helped to set a boy's broken arm and then cast it. It was really cool! We also hiked to various health posts and sub-health posts, and managed to pull together a health lesson for the local secondary school. They asked us to teach, but didn't know which subject we should focus on, they didn't have any resources, and they had no art supplies. It was a very rudimentary lesson, but the students seemed to be interested.
They almost never get foreigners in the village, so we were semi-celebrities. They even interviewed us for the local FM radio station!
It was for their health section, and they asked us questions about our experiences here and our suggestions for healthy living in the village. I guess I'm turning out to be quite the swastik guru (that's Nepali for health teacher).
We also learned how to plant rice! Talk about a fiasco! I've always wondered what the bottom of a rice paddy was like, and now I know: very thick, slippery mud with some snails thrown in. It's all uneven due to other people's footsteps, and I slipped almost immediately. We were covered in mud, but it was a lot of fun! Basically, you just take sprouts and shove them into the mud at even intervals and try not to fall over in the process. Maybe I've found my new calling in life...?
The monsoon officially started a week ago, and boy did we experience it in Phalebas! It often rained about 18 hours a day! You had to squelch your way through the ubiquitous mud, and washing your feet off quickly became pointless. Hiking up and down the mountains is rather difficult when you're walking on compacted mud covered in an algae-mossy slime type thing. There are many
video clips of Esther and me slipping and sliding our way down hillsides.
After a somewhat less grueling two and a half hour hike, we made it back to Kusma on Sunday, and braved another three hour bus ride back into Pokhara. We spent two days there kayaking, eating momos and naan, watching pirated DVDs (I must say that the new Indiana Jones movie was a let-down) at restaurants, and enjoying civilization. This morning, we got up at 4am to go see the sun rise over the Annapurna range of the Himalayas. It was a bit cloudy, but that's about as much as you can hope for during the monsoon. The clouds were less annoying than the flocks of Indian tourists who played Hindi songs very loudly and were just a bit too obnoxious for 5am. We got back to Kathmandu today after a very long eight-hour bus ride on a bus with very narrow seats and a nourishing roadside meal of French fries and scrambled eggs on toast. Delicious.
I feel like I'm leaving so much out, but I'm writing this off the top of my head in the internet cafe because my laptop is safely stowed
away in Chapagaun. I'm leaving the day after tomorrow to go to another village (though not quite as remote) with Esther and two other volunteers. I'm not quite sure what we'll be up to there, but it's supposed to be very culturally diverse and near the Tibet border. Should be a good time.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.056s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 8; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0345s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Katie
non-member comment
Everything looks so vibrant and fresh! Those pictures are amazing. Lemme know how that water buffalo milk is doing for you.