My New Place and Swear In

It’s been a little while since my last post and a lot has happened!!  We had our swearing in ceremony last week which was very nice.  I seem to have managed to delete the photos I had of the ceremony, but there are plenty on the facespace.  I was chosen/volunteered to give part of a speech in Nepali because at the time we had to choose who was doing what at the swearing in ceremony I had some of the best Nepali in our group.  Though, my last test scores certainly didn’t reflect this… I think I lost motivation on the whole studying thing which is not an uncommon phenomenon in my life.

Anyways, the speech went pretty well, and I once again officially became a Peace Corps volunteer.  And again, I looked properly ridiculous, though many people described it as “sharp.”  The week preceding the ceremony was spent in some hellaciously boring sessions, but we were finally free at nights to go do whatever we wanted which generally consisted of going to bars in the Thamel district of Kathmandu which is basically the trekker/tourist district.  There are a lot of western style bars, restaurants, and mountaineering shops which I checked out very thoroughly.  There is a lot of knockoff gear available, but also a fair amount of legit stuff, though a lot of the legit stuff is really old.  I found tons of old ice axes and stuff from what must have been the early 90’s or something.  That’s pretty old for mountaineering gear.

My favorite bar is called Purple Haze.  It is basically a huge warehouse that they built a very large stage at one end of, on which they have live music every night.  The music is just covers of oldish popular rock songs…so obviously I freaking love it!  The last night we were in Kathmandu a bunch of us went there and a very angry small Nepalese man decided he didn’t like me and spent probably a good hour trying to pick a fight with me.  Obviously, I wasn’t going to take the bait, but I’m sure it didn’t help that I had a smirk on my face the entire time because I found the whole situation so entertaining.  I kept telling myself, “If you would just stop smiling like an idiot then he would go away.”  But every time I tried forcing myself to have a straight face it would make me smile more.  Isn’t it strange how that works?  My face kept contorting in an attempt to look serious, but I knew just how ridiculous that looked and so would start smiling or laughing.  This did not help the situation, but eventually his friends dragged him out of the bar when they realized he wasn’t going to back down.  And even more importantly, earlier that day I ate enchiladas for lunch and pizza for dinner!  YUM!!!

The next day we all got on chartered buses and headed for our respective districts.  It took us almost 12 hours to reach my district, Parbat.  My group of Parbat volunteers stayed the night in the district capital, Kushma, and the next day had bunch of brief introductory meetings with various government officials.  Kushma also contains the longest suspension foot bridge in Nepal.  It is 344 meters, and I walked across it for fun.  It’s pretty high up too.  One of the volunteers with me does not like heights and was not very happy on the bridge.  It’s probably 300 feet high or so.  The drive from Kathmandu to Kushma was slow, but also pretty.  I got see the evening sun light up the slopes of Macchapucchre which is a very large mountain outside of Pokara.  And most of all it was nice to get out of the pollution of Kathmandu.  I think I am still coughing and sneezing black shit out of my lungs from all the heinous pollution.  I don’t recommend Kathmandu to anyone really.  Most of the luxuries can be found in other cities, and it is just too gross to handle for any period of time.

After the meetings my nearest site mate and I rented a truck to get us to our sites since I was told that a normal car couldn’t make it to my site.  We dropped my site mate at his place which is sort of on the “main” road, and then we turned off it and rallied the crap out of that truck to get to my site.  Unfortunately, the truck was two wheel drive so didn’t have the benefit of low range gears.  The road to my site is very steep, sandy, muddy, and has a nice sprinkling of large rocks to get over.  In the states it would be describes as a four wheel drive road, but here, it’s just a nice suburban street.

This blog is going to get long, I can tell… So I arrived at my house and holy crap it is so, so POSH!!! It’s got a real kitchen complete with a sink, two flushing squat toilets with showers, as well as another shower room. My room has electricity and a ceiling fan. And looking from my house I have a nice view of the Himalayas and most prominently Dhaulagiri, the seventh tallest mountain in the world. Here’s the view from my roof:

Dhaulagiri catching the last of the evening.  The other peaks have already lost the light, but Dhaulagiri is freaking enormous.

Dhaulagiri up close

 

My room

Looking the other way in my room

Looking out of my hallway

The ever important crapper

Shower

The kitchen

Looking the other way in the kitchen (swastikas are everywhere here, which takes a little getting used to)

 

I’ve spent a few days hanging out at the health post which is my office and just chatting with the very nice young ladies who work there.  I’ll talk a little bit about the health post situation a bit later.  I also went down to Beni with my host sister, who is also really nice, and just followed her around at work, and met a bunch of her friends who took me to lunch.  My host sister collects money from a bunch of little shops from this area and then deposits it with a cooperative which gives business loans to the businesses she collects money from and other businesses involved in the co-op.  She walks down to Beni and back up to my house every day.  It is literally 1000 vertical feet or so of stairs that have been built into the side of the cliff/hill.

So far, I am really, really happy here.  Until the end of Mali, I don’t ever remember being this happy.  This place just fits me so well I think.  I really, really enjoy sitting around with my family members and attempting to communicate.  I love eating with them, and recently, I helped my mom and dad cook dinner.  My sister asked if I would make pasta for them tomorrow.  Sure!!!  I also showed them the beauty that is a peanut butter and honey wrap made with roti (Nepali tortilla).  Of course, this is still just the first week, but I remember my first week being one of the hardest I went through in Mali.  Here, it has been the best I’ve had so far.  In training, I got along well with everybody, but the best friends I made were the Nepali staff.  I got along so well with my language teacher, and all of the other teachers.  My language teacher still texts me to see how I am doing at tell me about her day.  I can’t explain this place, but it works with me…so far.  I’m sure I’ll struggle at some point, but so far I couldn’t be happier with my village.  And… THERE ARE MOUNTAINS!!!  In Mali, I would try to see how long I could make it at site before going and seeing other Americans, here, I don’t even want to leave, except to go play in the mountains.  I’ve been scoping routes up some of the smaller mountains from my roof.  I’ve pretty sure there are some totally doable climbs that aren’t glaciated that are probably in 20,000 ft range.  I’ll have to do some more research.

Okay, now about the health post.  Nepal is way more developed than Mali.  My counterpart is the head of the health post and under him work four Female Community Health Volunteers.  They have had some training, and are given a small salary (about the same as me), to treat common things at the health post like colds and diarrhea etc.  The problem is that the health system is really focused on treatment and not prevention at this time, and the medicine is free provided by the government.  On top of this the workers aren’t overly knowledgeable about the medicines they are giving.  I’m guessing fewer people are dying from diarrhea and stuff now, but the next step is prevention.  They give every person that comes in with a cold Amoxycillin, and every person with diarrhea Ciproflaxin.  I think we know that over doing antibiotics is not good; on top of that Amoxy does nothing for colds.  I tried explaining this today.  I reminded them what bacteria are and that antibiotics kill bacteria, both the good and bad so don’t give it all the time.  I made up some basic rules to follow, like only give Amoxy for strep, which they know about, and only for colds if people’s snot is green and yellow and they have a fever.  Anyways, hopefully I can make some progress on that front, and hopefully some of the trainings I have in mind will help with prevention.  We’ll see.