A long day

The other day was interesting and extremely frustrating at times.  I was told by my counterpart that my supervisor that is based out of Kushma wanted to meet with me the next day and that we would leave early in the morning.  Then he left and I didn’t see him the rest of the day.  Well, “early in the morning” in Nepal can mean anything from 4 AM to 11AM.  So, I just put it from my mind and figured I go about my normal routine until it was time to go.  My counterpart came and woke me up around 7:30 which is about when I normally get up, so big deal.  He informs me that we would be leaving in 15 minutes, and “did you forget what I said yesterday?”  “No, I didn’t.  Okay, I’ll see you at your house.”  I get up and am ready to go, but of course I can’t leave the house without drinking tea first!  Heaven forbid!  So I show up like 25 minutes after he got me up.  He says that the ambulance is coming which we will be traveling in, and we are also waiting on a sick person who will also be going with us in the ambulance.  We will be dropped in Kushma, and the sick person will go on to Pokara for treatment.  Then we sit and drink tea again.  I ask what happened to the sick person, and it turns out she fell from a tree.  Anyways, we sit and some time passes.  I wander back home to help my host father carry some stuff, and now it is around 9:30 AM.  The ambulance shows up and the sick person as well.  Well the woman who fell from the tree is like a 65 or 70 year old!  So, I sit in a little broken jump seat, the husband sits on a stool on the floor, the woman sits/lies on the bed/my counterpart has the front seat and then there is the driver.  A little crowded, I’m not so sure I should be on the ambulance.  I feel like the family should have priority, but I just sit quietly.  The lady has had no treatment, and I’m thinking maybe she should be given some wraps or something to make her more comfortable.  Something I’ve had training and can do.  We are on the road now, and the ambulance obviously has no supplies in it.  Why would an ambulance have medical supplies?

The ambulance: a TATA Ambulance.  It has been beaten and broken over the years.  The back door doesn’t open so anyone who wants to get in the back has to crawl over the front seat.  This is hard to do for an injured 70 year old.  Also, it limits how much immobilization of injured limbs is possible.  The front suspension is, as far as I can tell, gone.  No springs, no shocks, nothing.  So the ambulance sags pretty low in the front which is compounded by broken pieces of the four wheel drive system which just sort of hang loose.  Also, as you can imagine it makes every little tiny bump pretty jarring.  Also, there is no spare tire and the tires that are on it are not super awesome to say the least.

So, I ask the lady what hurts.  She says her left leg, collar bone area, ribs, and lower back all hurt a lot.  Plus she has a pretty wet sounding cough/wheeze.  I ask if she can take a deep breath, and no she cannot.  I’m thinking at least bruised ribs, and that I couldn’t figure out if the cough was something she always has from breathing cook fire smoke or developed after the fall.  On this road, we would have to stop for a long time to check her out properly, and we don’t have anything really to create splints with other than our own clothes.  I should have spoken up back in our village to make her ride a little better.  However, I consciously decided that I didn’t want to hassle with trying to talk people into letting me and my counterpart check her out before we left because I was tired and a annoyed at how the morning had gone and I just wanted to be left alone.  Very courageous.  So now, I was pretty grumpy at myself for not speaking up when I had the chance.  We finish slamming down the road, and get to another town on the main road.  Her we pick up some other random lady who turned out to be the daughter of the injured woman, but I was further annoyed at picking her up for a while until I asked who she was.  Anyways, we get to Kushma and I eat my breakfast at 11.  Then I head to meet my supervisor.  I meet him at the hospital as he is on his way out to another meeting that will be two hours long.  Okay… I met up with the other two volunteers who had been called in for this meeting, and they had shown up a little earlier and met with my supervisor who only wanted to tell them two things: please inform him when we go on vacation, and please write up a small report of our activities every once in a while and give it to him.  These two requests seem fairly reasonable to me, but probably could have been communicated over the phone fairly easily.

Now it is time for big meeting with the WHO (World Health Organization) about the various immunization drives and the progress they have made in Nepal.  This meeting was fairly interesting, but directed towards the Nepali health workers so I did not understand everything.  Also, it was a good three hours long, so after snack break the other volunteers and I decided to wander around for a bit.  Then they had to go home so they could get home before dark and I asked my counterpart what the status of the ambulance was.  He replied, “It is coming.”  We sat in for the tail end of the WHO presentation which only a few of the health workers did, and then around 4 we left the hospital to meet the ambulance somewhere.  My counterpart and the other guy who was to come with us were clearly in no hurry so I went and had some ice cream and then met up with them a bit later.  Soon it is 6 PM, and then 7.  I start getting grumpy about the delay.  I could have easily taken a bus, but my counterpart keeps saying it will be hear soon.  He calls the ambulance guy around 7:30 for an update.  I thought I heard something about an hour in the conversation, and ask him after how long it will be.  “15 minutes,” he replies… An hour later the ambulance shows up and we get in.  Now I am exceptionally grumpy and annoyed that my counterpart lied right to my face.  The guy clearly said an hour on the phone, and then I was told 15 minutes.  I would have gotten on a bus if he had told me the actual time, and would have been home before they even left.  But I also would have missed the coming excitement which made the whole day worthwhile.

So we get to the turn off to take the bumpy steep road up to my village.  Within a 100m we get stuck in the water that is flowing down the road over the rocks making them very slippery.  After a few tries of trying to nurse the truck through the rocks I get out and start stacking rocks to keep the tire from spinning as easily.  Then the guy backs up and I tell him to go at it pretty fast.  He goes pretty quick but is still hugging the left hand side of the road where it is the roughest because the right hand side has a pretty mean drop off into a creek 30 feet below.  I convince the driver on the next go to let me have a go at it.  I back up, and the whole time the other gentlemen are babbling at my open window.  I just sort of nod along, and then rev the engine and rally that bad boy up the road hugging the side close to the edge, but not concerned about going over having rallied a road or two in my day…  I get past the part where we were stopped go another ten feet and then hit another rough spot and get stopped.  So I back down, and now we have to do some more road rearranging.  Also, the all of them start pleading with me to get out because they were very scared watching me go up the road.  I plead for a while to let me do it, but give in and hand the car back to the driver.  After some more rearranging it is time for another go.  I tell the driver to go fast and he does, but still stays close to the left side, and gets stopped.  So I tell him to go on the right side of the road and go fast, and he does and we make it through.

Twenty bumpy minutes later we get to a pretty rutted spot that has a fair amount of mud.  Here we again get stopped.  But this time we get really stopped.  The front suspension is hanging so low that we managed to get high centered on some rocks in the mud.  The back tires have no traction so we can’t go forward or backward.  We dig around for a while with a pick and then I ask for a jack.  We have that, but positioning under the sagging front suspension would require a lot of digging so we try to jack from the steel side step things which I tell them will probably bend.  They do, and we can’t jack high to get any rocks under the tires, so I say we have to try again.  The say to just put some rocks near the tires and they will try backing off the jack onto the rocks.  Well, that sounds like a horrible idea, but go for it.  They give it a try and gain us a good 4 inches.  We are still stuck.  At this point, I get in and try some crafty vehicular maneuvers, and after much tire spinning get us another two inches.  By now it is 11:30 and they have a pow-wow about what to do.  I say I am walking home, and that is what everyone decided to do with the plan of the driver to go back very early in the morning to get help from one of the tractors that would be coming up the road.

So I have a nice hour long walk under a near full moon, and arrive home at 12:30.  I eat dinner and go to bed.

The driver went back early in the morning and got out then drove another quarter mile at which point it appears the front suspension snapped in half and now the ambulance is sitting peacefully on the side of the road halfway to my village until the people here decide to make fixing it a priority…so quite possibly forever.

And in other news, the other day I was invited to have lunch with the other volunteers from Parbat and Baglung districts with the Ambassador of the United States to Nepal.  This was to take place in Baglung district capitol so I went there and had a delicious lunch with some volunteers, the Peace Corps Nepal Country Director, the USAID Nepal Country Director, a previous volunteer in Nepal who now works in the Foreign Service here in Nepal, and the Ambassador.  The Ambassador sat at the head of the table, and the other volunteers started sitting several seats down so I snagged a chair right next to him to hear what he had to say about the Foreign Service.  First he gave a speech to all of us about the need to hang in there and whatnot that seemed pretty much scripted by our Country Director and it was pretty clear that the lunch was just a morale boost for the struggling kids in our group.  But hey, it was a pretty cool morale boost.  The ambassador had a few interesting stories, but mainly he just looked sort of tired.  It could have just been a long day, but I’m guessing that that job is just stressful.  That said, he did make the Foreign Service sound fairly interesting… After the lunch I had some more interesting transportation issues which caused me to stay in Baglung for the night and even more the next day, but that is a story for another time perhaps.