Author Archives: All The Pieces

Around Town, Kaskikot, Nepal Life, Reflections

The Olympics of Self-Quarantine

, , , , , , 12 Comments

EDITORS NOTE: Back in late May, just as this post was ready to be published, so many things happened, frontlined by the tragic murder of George Floyd and the uprisings against racial injustice that followed. All of my blog posts were delayed in coming weeks, which became months of more surprises, transitions, public reckoning, and adjustment. So for now, thanks for reading along as I catch up on unpublished entries from the intervening time.

– –

Here we all are nearly two months in to this bizarre reality. The team in Nepal have all been working from home, and we meet daily for a morning and evening call. I join the evening call in Nepal every day at my 7:15am in Connecticut, and getting up each day for our call has been the ordering event of my American quarantine experience, forcing me to maintain a routine that starts early each morning with human connection on the other side of the world.

The number of Covid cases reported in Nepal is still low, but major cities are on complete lockdown, with police in the streets. In Kaskikot and most of our rural working areas, it seems people are going about their daily business – corn planting season has just ended – but transportation and commerce are mostly shut down. There is a worry that Covid cases may only be starting to hit a rise now, as the first deaths have just occurred; but it is hard to know how the lack of testing, reporting and accessibility to hospitals in so much of the country plays in to the accuracy of data on case prevalence.

One particularly interesting discovery is that Nepal seems to have largely based its quarantine strategy on an extremely well-rehearsed protocol for political shut downs. Political strikes have been the main style of public dissent (or social control, depending on your point of view) for the last 25 years in Nepal. When a strike, or “bandh” (“closing”) is instituted, transportation, schools and businesses are closed, people mostly stay home, and if you need to go somewhere, you walk.  Depending on who has called the strike, and the level of power and uncertainty involved, police may patrol the streets to ask what business you are out for and decide whether or not to send you back home.

And for the moment, it seems this is more or less the same strategy that has been enthusiastically deployed for Covid prevention.

On the plus side, Nepali people are pretty used to the bandh-style quarantine. Back when I first started visiting Nepal in the early 2000’s during the civil war, bhandhs were imposed almost weekly by either the Maoists or the government. After the overthrow of the Monarchy in 2006, a notable effect was a bandh-free-for-all whereby any sub group with a pending discontent of any kind would call for a strike: drivers striked to protest fuel prices, teachers striked to protest salaries. In 2012, a series of strikes broke out across the country when the Parliament was trying to move to a federalist political system, and ethnic groups as small as 150 people called for closings to demand representation in a new state constitution. One sub-group would strike one day and everything would be closed, and the next day, everything would stay closed but now on behalf of the responding strike by another sub-group. And because bhandhs are shut downs (not simply a refusal to work), these protests were widely understood to mean that the entire public was to stay home.  So everybody would just stay in their houses or go for short walks until everyone with something to say was done striking.

With some exceptions, that is—such as the Gurung strike in Pokhara during the 2012 series, which involved both policed closures and exuberant Gurung dancing and singing at the empty traffic intersection in Mahendrapul. Which was followed later in the week by a Brahamin strike and corresponding displays of cultural force.

All of which is to say, in Nepal coronavirus has met the Olympic World Champions of self-quarantine. However I’d like to also report that for the sake of the global pandemic, a few fantastic additions have been made. Topping the charts, we have these people-catcher-thingies on long poles. Really. See for yourself. This terrific solution ensures police don’t have to potentially touch covid-y pedestrians who are found to be walking without cause or ID, and I am so glad it has had occasion to be invented and put on the internet.

As to our daily team meetings: in the odd dream of a halted, people-catcher filled world, with all primary health care either paused or redirected to coronavirus response, the tinny voices of my colleagues over Viber each morning has helped to maintain a sense of movement while most of our work and so much of the world stands still. We’ve challenged each other to home exercise goals and used our office messaging system to share videos of our respective jump roping efforts (Rajendra impressively did his with a traditional namlo rope used to carry baskets). We employed our dental technicians to make personal phone calls to all the patients in their registers to go over Covid-prevention guidelines. We began a home-made mask campaign.

We have also, finally, taken this time to launch our youtube channel. There is a huge variety of content here: tours of our clinics, cute kids doing school brushing programs, samples of community outreach parent discussions and child-friendly dental care in schools, some words from a village chairman about our project, and my personal favorite: the annual Oral Health Bhailo competition, where schools record traditional bhailo songs on the to topic of oral health during the festival of Tihar (seriously, these are devastatingly adorable). These videos really bring the people and places we work with to life and we’d love you to click around and visit us at home in Nepal! (And better yet, please subscribe to our channel!)

After all, we’re gonna be in this for a while. It’s a great time to connect.

*

America, Around Town, Earthquake, Kaskikot, Nepal Life, Reflections, Work

A House of Mirrors

, , , , , , , , , , , 8 Comments

 

These past few weeks, I increasingly find myself reliving the morning of April 25, 2015, when my phone woke me at 6:30am. I rolled over and Prem was on the line: a 7.8 magnitude earthquake had ripped through Nepal. I stumbled to the kitchen table in my slippers and didn’t move for what seemed like days. The papers were covered with images of fallen temples that were whole in my albums, with tent cities at familiar outdoor intersections in Kathmandu, with maps seen from high above and covered in digital markings. It was a long time before anyone could capture photos of people, especially in the rural expanses of the country, which were accessible only by helicopter for what seemed like ages. But in my mind’s eye the earthquake was a long, long parade of individuals. Today, I reread the email I sent out three days later.

It is a strange feeling to find the whole planet in crisis. Population-level disasters of this scale seem to disproportionately fall upon the shoulders and homes and rivers of the world’s most vulnerable places, while the other places try to help. In the years I have worked in Nepal, Nepali people have plodded on through civil war, three major government transitions, annual landslides and floods and hail, the 2015 earthquake, water shortages and electricity outages up to sixteen hours a day for years on end, and of course, the daily vulnerability of chronic poverty, weak infrastructure, and floppy safety regulations. The road to Kaskikot has had three bus accidents in the time I have considered it my second home. I remember thinking after the earthquake, as I watched messages flood my accounts, that people didn’t realize how often Nepal’s communities were used to seeing things broken, taken, lost, or never having existed in the first place. The earthquake was unthinkably horrible. Yet for those who didn’t lose everything–people, entire villages–that trauma was largely swallowed within a few months by massive shortages of petrol and goods due to political instability and border closings. The summer brought deadly landslides. Six months later, most of the country was no longer discussing the earthquake.

These last few weeks have been an odd, house-of-mirrors experience. While Nepal is facing pandemic, New York City and Milan and Barcelona and Sydney are also facing pandemic. My colleagues are quarantined in Pokhara and Kaskikot and Tilhar, and I’m quarantined in Hartford, and Prince Charles is quarantined in London. The realization that anything could happen to anyone at any moment has set upon us all, a realization that seems to be expanding daily. And amidst a great deal of chaos and uncertainty and worry, I find myself in occasional moments of disconcerting calm. Things were always this way. Now they are simply unveiled. We are all the defenseless Other.

Now as then, there is great beauty to uncover in difficult times. In the months after the earthquake five years ago, we improvised. I have no idea how many kilometers Dilmaya and I walked. Practically speaking, I learned a huge amount about the contributions a small community-based organization like ours can offer in disaster management. At that time we found we were well placed to spend personalized time on unique household and community circumstances, to mitigate challenges that didn’t meet a universal disaster threshold but were extremely destabilizing for the specific individuals facing them. Our focus became “the lower percentage of damage:” the houses that were not fallen, but cracked and indeterminately unsafe. It was a life-changing experience.

Every day this week I’ve joined in a group call with my colleagues in Nepal as they work from home, developing a strategy to redirect our rural health care personnel from dentistry to coronavirus. Since we launched our Dental Hub app in September, hundreds of patients and their phone numbers have been entered in our database, so our first step is having dental technicians replace their weekly clinics with “phone clinics,” calling every patient in the database. We’ve created a script for checking in with each family to see how well they’ve been able to implement isolation guidelines and what if any obstacles are in the way. We don’t yet know how this will go or how useful it will be, but it’s something to do. It’s a way to be in community.

All that said…the 2015 earthquake was irreconcilably different than the looming crisis we are facing now. To begin with, the rest of the planet is occupied with its own emergency, not fundraising and overloading the aid channels in Nepal with variably useful assistance strategies. Second, Nepal’s health care system was inadequate to meet public need before coronavirus, and there is effectively no intensive care available for severe Covid-19 cases. So even though there are so far very few confirmed coronavirus cases in Nepal, I am still trying to understand how “flattening the curve” works in a health care system where the capacity threshold is fairly close to zero. We don’t know the answer, if there is one. I’m not sure yet if anyone does.

Like many of us, I can’t help but wonder how we would understand our society if we felt this vulnerable and interdependent all the time. It is deeply unfamliar to us in the dominant American culture–replacing the community of work-productivity with the community of survival. Confronting the primacy of the nuclear family, when that family is cut off from neighbors, schools, social supports, food production, occupation, and future planning. This discomfort feels worthy of deep and shared reflection. In the mean time, I have made a call list, and have been doing one quality catch-up each day with someone I’ve missed, or who I want to make sure isn’t alone.

For whatever reason I also found myself drawn back this week to this poem, written during the (still unresolved) family separation crisis at the US border in the summer of 2018. I hope to use coming weeks to catch up on past entries and continue posting about the unfolding of this pandemic Nepal on my blog. In the mean time, wishing all of you patience and resilience and comfort as we, as a world, navigate the weeks and months ahead.

*

 

At the Base of a Tree

The cicadas came when I was five
behind the school yard.
I put my finger on one
and then I picked it up
it was like a fig, dark and rough.

At five cicadas were interesting, like figs.

Now I am much bigger
friendly, the little goat nuzzles my shoulder with his warm snout
soft, we are alive, together easily.
And then I press my eyes shut
as I capture the insect that has invaded this carpet, which is mine
because I own it.

Sometimes I wonder how I can find my way back
from the pliant kid to the figs to the cicadas, captivated
with all their legs, their slick ribbed shells, all their songs enchanting
the school yard
all chirping and chirping tickling my ears until my ears overflowed with music
amid the crunching leaves and delicate wings
a symphony, a society, a universe blossom
after seventeen years of silence.

Sometimes I wonder
what we are afraid of
why we crush things, bugs and leaves and oceans and people
when I was five, I used
just one tiny finger
to say hello.

 

 

 

Nepal Life, Reflections

Everest Part 3: Air

, , , , , , , 2 Comments

<– Prelude: Pemba

<– Part I: The Height

<– Part II: Sagarmatha

Day 6: Air

Gorapchep—> Kyangjuma / 3550m (11,646ft) O2 sats 90

After I got back from Base Camp yesterday, I was absolutely spent. My muscles weren’t tired exactly, but it’s hard to describe the physical sensation of altitude to which you are truly not acclimatized. It is as if each of the cells in your body has its own individual case of asthma and is wheezing. All your organs are wheezing. They work, but you feel a kind of sluggish you didn’t know existed. It is hard too imagine digesting anything, because nothing inside of you feels like it’s doing anything except lying in bed, wheezing.  

With this in mind, I would now like to share that as I approached the hotel on my way back from Base Camp yesterday, right there in the yard was…

A LOCAL SOCCER GAME.

Are you kidding me??

In my wheezy brain, this was one of the most incomprehensible sights of my entire trip to Everest Base Camp. I was practically counting my steps back to my bed. When I got to bed, I was going to hear a knock on the door, and a happy hotelier was going to be standing there with a celebratory hot chocolate for me on the house. And, try as I might to drink this gift because it was so lovely and festive, it was to go cold on the tray, because it just seemed to complicated. AND OUTSIDE, THESE KIDS HAD THE NERVE TO BE PLAYING SOCCER.

Later that evening, we all gathered around the hot stove. The whole group had made it to Base Camp, but the Brit felt too unwell to come downstairs. I was doing comparatively okay, but I barely swallowed any of the noodle soup I had for dinner. We heated our hands, chatted a while, took our oxygen saturation levels for sport, and went to bed.

This morning, Laura (#2) was still too nauseous to drink or eat and couldn’t really get out of bed. She’s a fit marathoner who took a reasonable route up with two acclimatization days. Eventually, her husband decided it was time to call an evacuation helicopter. Out of about ten people I got to know during this week, two were evacuated. Once you know to listen for it, you can hear many helicopters throughout the day. Seriously, hanging out at 16,000+ feet is no joke. As for me, I was making do, but my O2 sats had been in the 60s for almost three days, and I couldn’t wait to get down to thicker air. 

After tea Thorsten and I said goodbye to Franco and Laura and their guide Narayan, and began our descent, along with Thorsten’s guide Dinesh and porter Kisan. Maybe it was mostly psychological, but by Lobuche I wanted breakfast. We continued, retracing our steps at four times the speed we’d labored them the first time. I passed a guy I met at the start of my walk. A few of us have been keeping track of each other in group chats. This guy had lost the trail back around Dingboche and spent an entire night outside with no sleeping bag. I was pretty impressed that he was still on his way up to Base Camp, after that. 

I arrived back at Thukla Pass, this time approaching from the other side, where the regal memorials rise in to view with indescribable majesty—the peaks on the imminent horizon leaning in as if the curvature of the earth itself is drawn toward them. It occurred to me to make sure I got another photo from this angle, where the saddle of the pass yawns dramatically at the sky; but I was so tired. I just wanted to get below Thukla and feel strong again. And, I thought, I had taken pictures once—humbly, I hope, and out of awe and admiration. But now I should just keep my camera where it was, and honor this beautiful place by passing through peacefully. 

We arrived back at Thukla by mid morning, and from here I made the choice to say goodbye to Thorsten and Dinesh and Kisan. Who, like reasonable people, were descending on the steeper route down to Pheriche, which was the route I’d come up a few days ago, idiotically giving myself even less time to acclimatize. Now I wanted to see the parallel path, slightly longer, that most people take on the way up through Dingboche. But also, I knew that I was going to have to rejoin myself in solitude at some point. It had been a great gift to walk quietly along behind others during the hardest days of the trip, and it was difficult to separate. But Thukla was where I’d come in to company, and it was the place where my path was to go its own way again. We exchanged contact information, and then I was alone with my map.

Dingboche

And I felt quite alone.

I walked and walked, losing elevation by the minute. I didn’t stop for lunch, only to occasionally adjust my clothing. Well below Dingboche, the oxygen-deprived environment remained vast and barren. I didn’t mind the absence of people, but I felt a terrible longing for trees and for needles underfoot, to provide order and comfort. For a path with two sides, instead of a mere carving in enormous open space.

Around Deboche, I came across two porters on their way to Namche. One was carrying five blue barrels and the other a load of goods in boxes. I wondered if I could make it all the way to quaint, hotel-packed, latte-serving Namche, where I’d slept my first night of the trip. I considered whether the porters might make road companions, but they alternately walked too fast for me to keep up (yes, while carrying those loads), or stopped for extensive periods of beer drinkin, and this proved difficult to plan around. So I just kept walking. 

I walked 20 miles. Around 5:15, in a frosty dusk I somehow welcomed, I bobbled in to a guest house in Kyangjuma, a few kilometers short of Namche. The hotel owner said it would be an extra 200 rupees (about $1.75) for an attached bathroom. This sounded amazing. I ordered a real dinner of daal bhaat and ate most of it. I was still over 11,000 feet, but I felt like a different person. My O2 sats had, over the course of 8 hours, gone from 65 to 90. 

I got a call from Dinesh, Thorsten’s guide, and an update on where they’d arrived (Deboche) and on how Laura and Franco were doing after the helicopter evacuation (fine). Back in internet contact, I sent messages of my whereabouts and well-being. I had my first good sleep in a few days, and was so glad to feel normal that I didn’t even feel any aches.

 

Day 7: Docking

Kyangjuma —> Lukla 2840m (9317ft) / O2 Sats 95

On the way up, at the elevation of Kyangjuma (where I passed through the first time with Tenzin Dorje Sherpa, the climber and yak herder), I felt myself high above the ground and adventurous in the cold. But on the way down, it feels cosmopolitan. The bucket of water in the bathroom isn’t frozen, and I am normal-tired, not wrecked.

After a cup of tea, I hiked about an hour to Namche Bazaar and stopped for breakfast. Unlike a week ago, this morning Namche was unveiled and shining. Its steep alleyways were nevertheless caked in layers of hardened Februrary ice, and I did a good bit of sliding around in trying to find a place to sit down for breakfast…because with a night’s sleep at lower elevation, I was HUNGRY! I ordered an amazing breakfast at the Khumbu Lodge and ate it looking out at lovely famous Namche. I called my parents. I moved to a coffee shop. I got a latte, and lingered.

I was taken in by a poster on the wall comparing various sites along the route to Everest Base Camp at different points in time. Namche: houses and potato fields where visitors camped then, a hip ampitheatre of cafes and hotels now. Pheriche: fields with stone-shingled huts in 1977, a village of tin-roofed guest houses now. Dingboche: a remote traditional village in the fifties, a mixed crop of buildings now. These images were fascinating. These were places I had been now.

But far more jarring were photos of glaciers from the 1950s and 1970s, next to the exposed rock those same massive ice sheets had become in just a few decades. The river by Pheriche, delicate fifty years ago, was dramatically widened by glacial melting in its twin photo. These changes might have seemed abstract, from far away. But standing in Namche, I momentarily felt the full force of this injustice. How could we do such things to this magnificent wilderness? When it is so much larger than we are? When it has been here so much longer? It demands so much less and gives so much more than we do. The pain of destruction stared blankly at me from the poster, incomprehensible. I ran my finger over the peeling vinyl covering that showed me where my feet had been just hours ago.

I leisured in Namche until 11am. And then it was another 15 miles back to Lukla, where I was determined to make it for the night. I didn’t take many photos on my way back. I felt the natural arc of my journey returning to its source. I had come out of the gate with fire, and now like a rocket falling back to the ocean by the natural progress of gravity, I was ready to dock at home. I was pretty tired by this time, and my toes hurt from ramming against my shoes downhill for 35 miles, and I was walking slower. I missed the boys and Didi and Prem, and the office team, and our List of Things to Do.

The clouds had once again moved in when I clomped in to Lukla. Its stone-laid street reminded me of a ski town, misty in the fog. I was so ready to have a hotel that when I found a hotel and nobody came to the desk for five minutes, all I could think of to do was go across the street to an “Irish Pub” to figure out my options, and order french fries. That turned out to be a great strategy. I have never had such fantastic fries in my whole life, and let me tell you I have eaten a lot of french fries. 

I found another hotel. I took a hot shower and then raced about chattering in the cold air, flailing at my clothes while the hot water evaporated off me. Lukla is still at 2840m (9318ft), after all, and it is February. I had dinner, did a little writing, and organized my belongings once more for the morning. I set my alarm for 6am so I could get to the airport before the first flight to buy a ticket home.

Namche
It’s steep alleyways were nevertheless caked in layers of hardened Februrary ice
Approaching Lukla
I was pretty tired by now.
I missed the boys and Didi and Prem, and the office team, and our List of Things to Do.
Reflections

Everest Part 2: Sagarmatha

, , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

<–Read Part 1: The Height

Day 4: Joining forces

Thukla—> Lobuche / 5000m (16,404ft) /O2 sats high 60s

When I woke up this morning I felt immensely improved. My sats were still in the low 70s, but my appetite was somewhat back and the nausea and headache were mostly gone. I had originally thought I’d go up to Gorapchep and maybe even Base Camp today, but even I can learn to slow my roll in response to lack of oxygen. I planned instead to make a short hike about 300m higher to Lobuche. 

I decided to first take a walk for an hour or so around the area on the descending route that leads back down toward Dingboche. When I arrived back in Thukla from my short excursion, there were a handful of hikers there on their way to Lobuche. I was feeling the need for company, so I joined in behind them.

Thukla Pass

The indescribable beauty of Thukla Pass

The walk began with a steep rocky climb up to Thukla Pass, which sits in the palm of a stunning panorama of ocean-blue peaks. This site is home to memorials for climbers of many nationalities who have died on peaks in Nepal. The wind comes gusting through the half-crescent pass, keeping hundreds upon hundreds of fresh prayer flags in constant flutter. I was awed by the power and beauty of this place. We found the memorials for Scott Fisher and Rob Hall, who both perished in the famous 1996 Everest climbing disaster that is documented in Into Thin Air. One of my most vivid pre-Nepal memories remains reading that book on the bottom bunk bed in my freshman college dorm room. I placed a stone on each of their memorials, and we went on.

From Thukla Pass I clomped along behind my new companions, who included two Nepali guides and porters, a German, a Brit, an Italian and me the American (“there must be a war joke in here somewhere,” says the German). We reached Lobuche by 1:00 and I had the whole afternoon to rest. 

My head had a dull throb and my body felt oddly heavy. I lay back in my bed. My room was warmed by a buttery sun pouring through the window. I stayed like that for a few hours, picturing my blood circulating delicious air. In the evening, we all clustered around the heating stove in the dining hall, and ate light meals that our altitude-confused stomachs would accept, and played cards.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Day 5: Sagarmatha

Lobuche —> Gorapshep—> Everest base camp / 5364m (17,598ft) / O2 sats 65

I have borrowed a fantastic pair of hiking pants from my long time friend Pemba Sherpa, but the button has broken. However, I am my father’s daughter, and you can be sure that I have a random collection of safety pins with me, because you never know when the button on your hiking pants is going to abandon you on exactly the day you are going to Everest Base Camp.

I arrived with my pants pinned at 6:30 for breakfast. I hadn’t been able to get a phone signal to send out any messages of my well being in two days, all liquid everywhere was frozen; hot cups of tea, once served, quickly threw off the efforts of the hard-working stove and turned to water, then ice. We ate small amounts of porridge and eggs and set off through a glacial valley at 5000 meters above sea level. I didn’t think to check the temperature, but once we got going, it actually wasn’t intolerably cold. And once we crossed the horizon line of ecstatic clear sun that was making its way toward us, we let out sighs of gratitude and I put my big futzy gloves away.

On the way to Gorapshep

The hike to Gorapshep was only about 2.5 hours and maybe 150m of climbing. It took us over rocky glacier bed dressed with ice and snow. We arrived at Gorapshep, where we’ll stay for the night, around ten in the morning. I clomped heavily up a wooden staircase to my room, emptied most things out of my backpack, and came down for a cup of tea. Even tea looked intimidating to digest; my O2 sats would sit around 65 for the next day. It feels like all the cells in your body are concentrating on breathing and nothing else.

Before we could get too content resting in warm sunlight outside, the German and I set off for Base Camp with his guide, Dinesh. But Thorsten and Dinesh were a few hundred meters ahead of me for most of the way, and I walked the hour and a half up to base camp mostly in the quiet of my own steps, boots grinding on ice and rocks. We had long since left behind anything green. It is amazing to think that nearly 800 people a day come through this way in the trekking season. In February, that number is about twenty, and I might just as well have been on the moon.

The first thing I recognized was the Ice Fall. Anyone who has spent any time learning about Everest has spent many imaginary hours scrambling precariously across ladders lashed together and fixed over the dangerous crevices that separate Base Camp from Camp One. In real life, the Ice Fall is far more otherworldly than I had understood. It is not a smooth cracked glacier but an enormous army of aqua-blue ice walls, lined up one to the next as far as the eye can see. 

And there in the distance, next to the base of the Ice Fall I spotted a cluster of yellow tents. Base camp. (In a few months, there will be about 2000 people here, but now the area is empty except for a dozen tents huddled together in the wilderness.). The arrival is marked by a large rock with EVEREST BASE CAMP 5364m spray painted across it. 

Climbing teams before the ice fall

Two intrepid winter climbing teams at Base Camp are dwarfed by Everest’s mighty Icefall.

Before I could do any normal tourist things, such as the obvious thing of taking a picture next to the spray painted rock, I got to chatting in Nepali with Norbu, a Sherpa climber with the German expedition.

Well, then this happened. Norbu Sherpa—who has summited all 8000m peaks in the world except for one in Tibet—invited me over to the German climbing camp. Normally tourists aren’t permitted in the expedition areas. But next thing I knew I was sitting in the dining tent, having a peek at the shower and sleeping quarters, drinking some coffee hot off the stove, and discussing the impending winter summit attempts with a combined group of Sherpa climbers from the two expeditions. One of them was the guy – the ACTUAL HUMAN – in charge of deciding where to lash ladders across the Ice Fall. So that’s how I got the selfie below of me and a group of world class Sherpa climbers hanging out and shooting the breeze at Everest Base Camp and now my life is complete.

Chillin with winter expedition Sherpa climbers

There was some discussion about coronavirus and whether or not the Nepal government would close climbing from the Tibet/China side of Everest (apparently the ministry of tourism is reluctant to lose the income, but the consensus among the climbers was that nobody wants coronavirus). And then Norbu Sherpa and the gang took me over to the Spanish camp, which is a much bigger team of 14 people and led by renowned Spanish climber Alex Txikon, who is making his fourth attempt at a winter summit, something that hasn’t been done on Everest since 1993. 

So this takes us to me hanging out with Alex Txikon in the Spanish kitchen, while the cook prepares imported Spanish meat over the propane stove. Actually, at that moment I didn’t really realize how well known Alex Txikon is, partly because I was so amazed by the fantastic Spanish cooking extravaganza before my eyes. (It smelled amazing; how did they get all this stuff here; who can eat at this altitude?) Txikon has made winter climbing his trademark calling and has succeeded in numerous winter summits. His team had arrived at Everest just two days ago and planned to be there for the next month.

I asked Txikon what they do on the days they aren’t climbing. I was thinking, probably lots of pushups and rope-skipping.

“Read, write, relax,” he said. “Be in nature.” And though I didn’t ask, he added (and I paraphrase), “Here on Everest, they just put people in the summit. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about working with nature. It’s about planning, not luck. It’s not about the summit. So many people who come here, they aren’t climbers. They don’t understand or appreciate what is to plan and interact with the mountain.” I filed away how he used the word “plan,” so many times. It was, in a way, plain to see what he meant. All these people living here all winter at 17,500 feet—where I survived a few hours mostly on adrenaline—did not have an ounce of entitlement about them. They were gently in a relationship, one of respect and diligence and patience.

Seek the summit, yes; but you shouldn’t be here if the summit is what matters to you the most.

“Hello,” said an enormously tall, fresh-faced German man as he popped into the Spanish kitchen tent. 

“Hi,” I said. 

Actually this man was climber Jost Kobusch, who like Txikon can be found in the newspaper, and who told me he’s attempting a route that hasn’t been taken up Everest in 40 years. 

“So, um, what are you doing today?” I asked. 

“Oh, fixing a thing,” he said. “It broke up there.” That was about the extent of our discussion, but Kobusch had a gentleness and authentic exuberance about him. He looked as happy to be fixing a thing up on a cliff over the ice fall at Mount Everest as some people look fixing their cars in the driveway with a beer on Saturday. 

I ended up spending about two hours at base camp—quadruple my planned time. Thorsten had long since headed back. I asked Anup, one of my new Sherpa besties, to take my obligatory photos on the “base camp” rock. And then finally, before leaving, I took some time to myself, outside of the adventure. To be with the Mountain.

I sat down across from Everest, whose summit just pokes out between Nuptse (so recognizable) and Lhola. An icononic plume of snow drifted from its peak. A mid-day half moon floated in the endless, empty galaxy of sky just above, as if to say: Everything Else, This Way. I built a cairn. And suddenly I heard myself think to this mountain, “You set the path for my whole life.” And it is true. If not for Everest, I don’t know if I’d have been in Nepal.

People journey to this place in all kinds of ways. For many it is the adventure of a lifetime. I understand that for me, as much as I delighted in every the walk up and all its color and beauty and fatigue and unobtrusive companionship, this walk was a pilgrimage. It was about sitting face to face with our Earth Mother, Sagarmatha. I have been coming here for so long.

What a gift it is, to be in this world, and to be free.

*

We crossed the horizon line of ecstatic clear sun.
A fellow traveler
Encouragement from past travelers
Gorapshep
The Icefall is far more otherworldly than I had imagined.
The home of brave winter climbers
Chillin with Alex Txikon
Magical Nuptse
Nepal Life, Reflections

Everest Part 1: The Height

, , , , , , , 2 Comments

(<–Read Everest Prelude: Pemba)

Day 1 – Not Yaks

Lukla → Namche Bazaar / 3440m / O2 sats 92

The air strip in Lukla is world famous, and for good reason. One end is abutted against a vertical wall of land where the hills leap toward the sky, and the other end is abruptly concluded by an abyss. Takeoff from Lukla literally entails driving down a relatively short motorway and off the side of a cliff. Landing is the reverse: dropping down out of the sky and flying full speed at a meager strip of pavement on the edge of a canyon, at the other end of which is a wall. The cheers that erupt from the passengers after this thrilling landing are almost unwitting, a primal reflex produced by the exhilaration of (still) being alive. It was captured by my new friend Mac from China.

Since flights to Lukla can only occur in near-perfect weather, a handful of us had spent the last two days together ensconced in the Kathmandu airport. Each morning we showed up in the dark at six am as required, and waited the entire day for the weather to clear in Kathmandu and Lukla at the same time. We ate airport snacks, we tried to rent a helicopter together, we bonded through the searing disappointment of dashed efforts to fly to Lukla. And then, poof! On the third day, we were in Lukla by eight in the morning. We exchanged contact information and started a chat group to keep tabs on each other, which was nice because a few of us including me were traveling alone.

Most of the day was a gentle rolling climb without any areas that were too steep. When I saw my first herd of yaks I got so excited I jumped up on a wall, took out both my SLR camera and phone, tried to video and photo the yaks and the same time and didn’t quite accomplish either. Then five minutes later there was another herd of yaks, and then another, and soon I was just trying to stay out of the way of herd after herd of yaks made wide by their rucksacks. Then, late in the afternoon I found out that none of these herds were yaks. They were mules and “jopiya,” a mule-yak blend. Yaks, it turns out, are only at the higher altitudes.

I had thought to maybe stop in Monjo, but after days of sitting in the airport with unemployed adrenaline, I was elated to be outside and free. So at two o’clock I crossed through Monjo and began a challenging two and a half hour climb up to Namche bazaar. This ascent covers about 3000 feet of vertical elevation over the course of four and a half miles. For many travelers, the road from Monjo to Namche is an entire day’s hike. But the truth is that the tireder I got, the better I felt. 

As four o’clock approached, the sky became gauzy and cool. Namche Bazaar is a name you may have heard, recognizable even to people who don’t travel in these mountains, and late in the afternoon it appeared over the crest of a hill, like a dream. I felt something lift off of me, a yearning that has been around since my teens, to lay eyes on this amphitheater that has been the way through for so many travelers . By the time my boots were clomping over its stone-laid alleyways, fog was creeping in around Namche’s edges and over its rooftops.

Modern Namche is quite the trekking hub, but now hotels are closed for the winter and the village is cast with the quiet of hibernation. A few months from now, rooms will be nearly impossible to come by, but there were almost no people around. I found a lodge and set my bag down next to a bed by a window. I excitedly used the oximeter Pemba had given me to test my oxygen saturation. At 11,000 feet this is mostly just for fun, the way my rowing teammates and I used to wear heart rate monitors all day in college for unnecessary interesting data about ourselves. My O2 sats were still quite strong at around 92.

I was the only guest in the hotel. I changed my clothes, put my feet up next to a space heater, and ordered tea.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

 

Day 2: Real Yaks

Namche –> Tengboche / 3879m/ 12,696ft / O2 sats 92

I woke up and pulled the curtain back to find my room in a cloud. I had expected Namche Bazaar to be announced in glorious morning sunlight, but even the yard of the lodge was veiled in fog. I spent a slow morning in my sleeping bag and then having breakfast and tea. My body had a mild soreness that was rather satisfying after yesterday’s long walk, but the dull persistent ache in my head was less enjoyable. I didn’t realize that that was the beginning of the effects of altitude change. 

I set off late, around ten, and quickly became unsure which of Namche’s many footpaths to follow back to the trail. I had a map on my phone that was to be put to good use throughout the week, but it was no time before a passerby simply pointed me in the right direction. 

After making a pretty long walk from Lukla to Namche yesterday, I had decided on a normal day, a choice I considered leisurely. I chose one of the trails that cuts along the edge of the mountainside, is flatter and easier, and has fewer hotels along the way. It’s still a trekking route but on the map it looked like it might also have more transit by locals going about their everyday business. The clouds hung low all day, making the dusted hills look like black and white etchings.

It wasn’t long before I came upon a man herding yaks—and this time they were real yaks. They look nothing like yesterday’s mules. They have wide bodies and long rugged hair. We said hello to each other. 

So that is how I spent the morning herding yaks around a mountainside with Tenzin Dorje, walking at yak herding pace, a light swirl of snow about us. I learned that Tenzin is a Sherpa climbing guide who has summited Everest twelve times, and many other major summits in Nepal as well. He herds yaks in the off season. The yak bells made a gentle, optimistic clanging music as we walked and he whistled to his herd. After descending down to the valley, we stopped for tea in a wood-paneled house run by a delightful young woman named Dixya. She was delighted that I spoke Nepali, and I was delighted for her to teach me to say “May I please have a cup of tea” in Sherpa.

From the cottage, I bid farewell to Dixya and Tenzin Dorje. The afternoon was a long solo climb up to Tengbuche under a low sky. I had considered going another half hour or so up the road to Debuche, but by the time I crested the deserted, snow-covered ridge in Tengboche, I was feeling the chill of the dusty air. And besides, Tengbuche was too beautiful to rush away. There was a monk on skis. I decided to wake up here tomorrow, and got a room in the only open hotel. Even the monastery appeared shuddered.

In the high season, over eight hundred people a day pass through any given station on the Everest Base Camp route. My hotel had long, empty hallways and a long empty dining room where the hotel staff played cards all evening at one end. I was the only guest. Oxygen saturation is only 64% of sea level in Tengboche, but my O2 sats were still going strong at around 92. 

The bucket in the bathroom was frozen solid.

 

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

 

Day 3: Loner

Tengboche —> Periche—> Thukla / 4640m (15,157 ft) / O2 low to mid 70s

I’ve been feeling quite strong, so today I decided to take a route that many hikers take down, but fewer take up. It took me to a higher elevation, in Thukla, than the more common stop at Dingboche 200m lower. I felt fine hiking all day, but the last bit is a continuous 400m climb to over 15,000 feet, and when I sat down in my room, I definitely felt the altitude. So, point penalty to Spero for over-enthusiasm. 

The day getting to Thukla however was lovely. I awoke to a glorious, shining morning in snow-covered Tengboche. The monastery, dormant and friendless in yesterday’s afternoon’s mist, presided confidently over the sleeping buildings and searing white ground around it. Unlike the hushed mystery of yesterday’s walk in the low hanging clouds and fog, today was a sunglasses and SPF-50 kind of day.

I wound along the river, and the terrain changed to glacial riverbed warming under an electric blue sky, encircled in mighty peaks. I ran into a number of people portering goods to and from Namche Bazaar to higher elevations. The first was a pair of young men who, when I came upon them as I was crossing a bridge, had set down their loads on the other side and were hysterically laughing while taking photos of each other leaping into the air. They had left Namche the SAME DAY—-the place I hiked from yesterday—and made it here by about 11am, on their way to Periche. (That’s my day and a half of efficient hiking.) They said they were each carrying 96kg and getting paid about .35/kg. 

Next the path moved into the glacier bed and became more vaguely defined. Fortunately, around this time I happened upon a pack of porters carrying sheets of corrugated tin and slabs of faux-wood paneling to Periche. So any time I wanted to confirm the route, all I had to do was look for a walking door moving across the plain. I found this so funny that I took about fifty pictures of doors with legs resting in the gaping wide mountain landscape.

As I left the doors with legs behind, the afternoon became more and more solitary, with only an occasional hiker passing in the opposite direction. I crossed a pass in where the morning sun had given way to theatrical, solitary and proud gusts of wind, and Pheriche appeared in the valley. When I arrived down in Periche, I was utterly gratified to see a hotel with door-loads all around it, awaiting the day’s delivery that was coming along behind me. I stopped in at a hotel and chatted with a few locals who said it would take me about another two hours to hike to Thukla. So up I went. 

The climb was stunning, but there was something lonely about the desolate landscape and the wind gusting up the plain from behind. The afternoon clouds had settled in again, and the skies were no longer optimistic and bright.  I arrived in Thukla around four, feeling far away from everything. And, once I set down my bag, admittedly nauseous. There is a very big difference between 12,700 feet and 15,150 feet. My O2 sats had dropped to the low 70s.

When it was clear I was “feeling the height,” two gentle and matter-of-fact hoteliers made me vegetable soup and filled up my bottles with hot water for free. I knew immediately that tomorrow I’ll have to take it very easy and adjust to the altitude. I invited the hotel dog into my room to stay for company, but he wanted to sleep directly on my pillow, and ended up curling up just outside in the hall instead.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

 

Bonus: Find the Walking Door on the Way to Pheriche

Reflections

Everest Prelude: Pemba

, , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

 

During the hot summer of 2001, I was drawn to Nepal by the Mountain. Also, the mountains–these grand Himalayas where the world places so much of its imagination–but mostly, the Mountain itself. At some point in young adulthood I began reading books about Everest, and I simply knew I would go. It was never about climbing it, but about following it. Because, as my mom would say, it was there. 

I never could have understood nineteen years ago that the road to the Mountain would be so much longer and more magnificent than I had imagined. I originally visited Nepal with an international group that was studying medicinal plants, and during that muggy August week in Kathmandu, I optimistically rented a bike and made a 36 hour journey into the unknown that foretold something of the road ahead. I didn’t know what a vast constellation of adventures lay before me in the decades to come, or about the family and community that would adopt me as a daughter, or the public health project I would unintentionally co-found to address an issue about which I had no expertise. So many cut fingers and thunderstorms and shelled peas and paint-splattered clothes lay between me and Mt. Everest. But in recent years, my heart has wandered back to that horizon, which has remained an untouchable idea, visible in the real world only from a distance. 

This winter I knew, with the same certainty that first brought me to Nepal, that it was time to visit Everest at last. So I called up my oldest (by time, not age) Nepali friend Pemba Sherpa, who was on the cook and porter staff of the medicinal plant study group back in 2001, when we were both in our early twenties. Pemba has since become an extremely successful tour guide, and at a hotel in Kathmandu he produced for me a backpack, a pile of gear, and instructions to take on my journey. We played with the oximeter and found my oxygen sats to be 95 while sitting in Kathmandu. I downloaded an offline map and purchased a plane ticket to Lukla. 

I’ve decided to post my eight day trip to Everest Base Camp as a separate travel journal. But before it starts, let’s begin at Fire and Ice Pizzera in Thamel, where Pemba and I reminisced over dinner the night before my trip began. We jumped back to August 2001, when we met, and from there travelled backward through the chapters of his incredible life. 

Pemba in me in 2001

Pemba and me in 2001

Pemba was born in a village in Solukhumbu called Soloban. In the 1980s there was no school in Soloban and Pemba spent his days herding, even during the snowy winter months.  I remember him telling me once, “my feet were like rocks!” His herds used to take him from time to time to Lukla. Once, Pemba stayed a hotel for a some days while his goats grazed there, and the hotel owner told him that if he wanted to, he could consider getting hired as a porter for tour groups coming to trek in the Everest region.

Soon after, fifteen year old Pemba decided to leave Soloban without telling anyone. He went to the hotel and said he was ready to work. It was the mid 1990s and there were no phones or regular means of remote communication. It would be six years before he saw his family again.

With the lights of Fire and Ice Pizzera bouncing off wine glasses, Pemba recounted how the hotel owner assigned him to porter on a fifteen day tour with a Spanish group. 

His wage was two dollars a day. Among Pemba’s jobs was to bring tea to the guests in their tents each morning. There was one guest who didn’t drink tea, but every day when Pemba presented this guest with the tea tray through the opening of the tent, the man would put a 200 rupee tip–about two dollars–in the teacup. This continued for the whole trek: the guest never drank tea, but every day he tipped Pemba two dollars. Four dollars a day for fifteen days was more money than Pemba had ever seen in his life. 

At the end of the trip, the tour group produced a tip for the entire trek staff, and part of that went to Pemba. But in addition, he had made a special impression on the guests, and they pooled an extra $100 for him. And finally, he was gifted with several expensive branded down jackets that, at that time, were almost impossible to get in Nepal. He took that stuff all back to Lukla and sold it off and made another $300. He ended the two week trip with an unimaginable seven hundred dollars in cash. 

“‘Well,” Pemba laughed over our pizzas, “I said, ‘this is what I’m going to do!’” 

Pemba in 2001

Pemba on our trip in 2001

He ended up taking a bus to the city, living with a relative of the hotel owner, and working his way through the tourism industry. He began studying languages – English, Japanese, German. He had no way to contact his family back home, and his aunt was living relatively nearby in Boudanath, but there weren’t many people from Soloban in Kathmandu during those years and there was no way for the two of them to discover each other. One day a customer at the mountaineering supply shop where he was employed asked if he wanted to join the cook and porter staff of a plant study expedition for foreigners.

That was the trip where we met in 2001.

Pemba’s career took off in the following years. He speaks seven languages proficiently and has still never had any formal schooling. He runs a massively successful trekking business and has travelled to over forty countries. He has poured resources back into his home village of Soloban, rebuilding a school and helping to organize health care services. He was recently nominated to run for local political office. When I hiked to Soloban from Jiri Bazaar with Pemba and Prem in 2008 (the week our Aidan decided to show up twenty days early…), Pemba was received like a prince. 

“Call me if you have any trouble,” Pemba said, as we bid goodnight. “The path is easy to follow. It has always been your dream.”

–> Read Part 1: The Height

*

Headed to Everest Base Camp, 2020

Aidan and Pascal, Between Worlds, Family, Nepal Life

To Be a Son

, , , , , , , 2 Comments

 

Last night at 11:30 pm, Prem’s mother passed away.

Aidan and Pascal stayed over at my apartment, and in the morning we went to their uncle’s house for the funeral. When we arrived, everything was still new. Aamaa was still upstairs where she had been alive yesterday evening. Besides our Aamaa, the only other person in Nepal I call simply “Aamaa,” instead of “small mother” or “big mother” or some other aunt-related mother-qualifier, is Prem’s mother. She spent most of last summer with us at Didi and Prem’s, sitting quietly cross-legged on the bed, head bowed forward over her ankles, while the kids dangerously hammered a football against the indoor wall of the house, screeching with delight. Many evenings I would come sit next to her, even if there wasn’t much to talk about, to make sure she was part of the fun. Aamaa has been frail for many years now, and often her whole day was spent in near-stillness. Sometimes on those summer evenings I would rub her back, to make movement. At first she’d simply sit while I made circles over her ribs. And then she’d say udo, udo – a little up, a little over. And then she’d say, esari, and lift up her cholo above her shoulder blades, and I’d run my hands back and forth over her papery skin, the half moon of her spine bowed toward the floor like a stone path. 

At Narayan’s house, Prem pulled a sheer red sari back from his mother’s face and I passed a spoonful of scented water between her parted lips. 

As the yard began to fill with callers, Aamaa was moved downstairs and laid on the porch. Her body was wrapped in sheets and covered in garlands, and as they arrived, her adult children and their spouses leaned over her and let out piercing cries. Prem and his brothers shaved their heads, pouring water from brass vases, shivering in the cold. I was transfixed by the first pale stripe of scalp that appeared, like a gash between walls of black hair, which too fell away and curled bodiless and foreign on the ground. A bamboo gurney was prepared in the yard, and Prem’s mother was lifted on to it, her tiny body barely wider than the edges of the narrow stretcher. 

We walked four kilometers, along a length of the lake, and then through the bazaar, where a trailing white sheet pinned to wooden poles announced our procession and was swallowed close behind by vehicles and diesel swirling around our knees. Death in the middle of the mundane. An entire lifetime borne on her sons shoulders through the bus stop, where vendors were selling oranges. 

Pascal had gone home to help Didi pack her things. Didi and Prem will sit kriya for thirteen days back in his home village of Piodi, where Aamaa raised her six children. Pascal would have wanted to walk in the procession at his father’s side, but he was more urgently needed to help Didi prepare for the ritual mourning period. Pascal is our serious boy, a mercurial, old soul, and I felt the sting of his loss at not being able to accompany his grandmother to her last. Bethy and I followed behind Prem and Aidan and his cousins, Suman and Nalin, all roughly 12 years old, all steps behind manhood. One becomes finally a Brahmin son, in some ways, when performing the death rights for his parents. 

Although I’ve been present for the preparation of the funeral procession a handful of times over the years in Kaskikot, I’ve never followed it from house to river before, and I hadn’t realized that it is customary to jog. When I stop to drop off my backpack at a shop I frequent on the corner, where I can ask the proprietor to hold my things until I get back, we are quickly left behind, and we have to sprint to catch up. 

Once the pyre is lit, Prem will not touch anyone for thirteen days. But now, as we make our way toward the banks of the Gandaki River, Aidan is close by his father’s side, watching as men in the family take turns carrying his grandmother, their shoes pounding the asphalt. His cousin Suman is a sensitive, perceptive boy, who wept as his grandmother was lifted from his own father’s home to begin her final worldly journey in this lifetime. But Aidan is as shimmery and light as ever, energized by all the activity and people and the cousins he so loves to play with for endless, exuberant hours.

Then: “I want to try,” Aidan says suddenly. 

The running stops for just a beat. Carefully, the back of the gurney is lowered on to Aidan’s still-childlike bony shoulders. Instantly and without discussion, Suman has taken up the front. Their fathers and uncles stand around them, and my gaze captures this sudden and fleeting coming of age. The two boys struggle slightly under the weight of their grandmother’s body, but the whole rest of the world has fallen away as their only focus becomes carrying her home. After only a few meters of progress, the gurney is handed back, and Aidan is a boy again.

At the banks of the Gandaki, an enormous furnace has been recently built to provide a more efficient and eco-friendly form of cremation than the traditional funeral pyre. All of Aamaa’s jewelry is removed – the gold rings through her earlobes, the bangles around her tiny wrists, which cut in to flesh slightly, producing no blood. She is covered one final time, and Prem and his brothers circle her with copper vases and pour water around her. Then she is lifted in to the furnace, and the door is closed.

Now the thirteen days of kriya begin.

Aamaa, you birthed eight babies and never got to raise two of them. Your 20 grandchildren held each other today as you were carried away to the river under garlands, and your grandsons lifted you beside their fathers.

We will miss you here. 

*

Around Town, Nepal Life, Oral Health Care Project, Work

A Piece of Christmas Cake

, , , , , , , 2 Comments

 

For about two years now, we have been hard at work lobbing the new province government for health policy that includes primary oral health care. I’ve found myself hesitant to blog about many of the twists and turns in this aspect of our journey because political issues feel so sensitive while they are unfolding. And yet this phase of our adventure has produced some of the most colorful, absurd, harrowing and triumphant experiences we’ve ever experienced. Advocacy is, after all, a combination of showing up at government offices, making connections, making connections from connections, inviting people out to see our work, giving presentations, writing policy recommendations, rewriting policy recommendations, cajoling officials for meetings to discuss policy recommendations, and drinking tons and tons of tea and coffee over many coffee tables. These activities are exciting enough in a well-established, stable government. We are working with a government that is has been in perpetual transition for decades, with roads that wash out, with wise men and power saris, with astrological events that dictate the movements of both presidents and wedding parties.

I mean, all kinds of things happen. It is a shame not to tell you about some of them, some of the time.

Recently, we had a breakthrough: Province #4, ours, re-established a previously defunct “Basic Oral Health Training” for primary care providers. We spent almost all of the summer of 2018 madly campaigning for this training. The five provinces of Nepal and the provincial government structure itself had at that time only recently been established – prior to 2017, the federal government was sub-divided by 75 districts – and it would still be some time before personnel had their job parameters defined in the new structure. But our efforts that summer eventually paid off, and recently, through a winding chain of events and people, writes and rewrites, submissions and resubmissions, and patience possible only thanks to some amount of beer, a province-level Basic Oral Health Training budget training descended from the heights of government.

The training is not actually designed yet, so it is fragile and easily gutted, but this also our first major policy breakthrough at a high level of government. It taught us a ton about collaboration, persistence, and the emerging structure of Nepal’s new decentralized governance structure. Even this small-big step would have been impossible to accomplish by working alone.

So this winter, our sights are trained on the Province Training Centre, where the official Basic Oral Health Training will be delivered. This training has a long history in Nepal that I will share at a later time; suffice to say that the essential focus of Jevaia over the last decade has been implementation of care after health care workers have taken Basic Oral Health training that’s provided outside our organization. So by nature, our role has involved a lot further training and refining of skills. If there’s one thing we’ve been up to our, um, teeth in (sorry it was too easy), it’s training and professional support for midlevel providers to do “basic oral health care” in Nepal’s primary care system. That’s why we exist, and it’s how all of our health post clinics and community programs survive against tremendous headwinds.

Now, as you can see this is all very serious business, and our recent meeting at the Province Training Centre rose to the gravity of the occasion. With this shiny, hopeful budget allocated, it is essential that we lobby for a training program that reflects what we’ve learned in over a decade of up-skilling midlevel providers to deliver rural oral health care. So we printed out materials. We reviewed key strategic points. We went to the Province training center.

“You guys!” Rajendra, our Medical Coordinator, cried as we crossed the threshold of the Province Training Centre, examining his feet with a mix of alarm and delight and curiosity that is unique in this world to Rajendra. “I’ve worn the office slippers!” He giggled, and then looked shocked, and then giggled again. Indeed, a brief review of Rajendra’s feet confirmed that he was in fact wearing a pair of the shower shoes we use inside our carpeted office, and his sneakers were still safely stowed on the shoe rack by the office door.

I began to giggle too. “Maybe nobody will notice?” I said.

“Sita Ram sir!” Rajendra announced to our Program Director, excitedly. “I’m wearing the office slippers!” He couldn’t help it. He’ll agree with me when he reads this.

We were led in to the office of the government’s oral health Training Coordinator, where we left our shoes and shower slippers at the door, conspicuously not blending together.

We had a lengthy, complex, and sometimes coded meeting with the Training Coordinator. We were thrilled to find out that a technical working group is to be formed and we are invited to send a representative. The Training Coordinator requested that we also submit an evidence basis for our recommendations, and I will spend the next week compiling a selection of scientific literature around an “augmented Basic Package of Oral Care.” (For you nerds out there, the BPOC was developed with the support of the World Health Organization back around 2003 and is well documented in the literature; meaning we didn’t invent it, our business is to translate it in to practice in the face of real-world challenges.)

From the Training Centre, we re-donned our shower slippers and moved to the Health Division, the government department the Training Centre sits under. There, at the door, we ran in to none other than our past Jevaia program director! Nabaraj now works as a training coordinator in the province offices – perhaps a hopeful sign for us. We were warmly welcomed and led in to a cavernous office with an enormous with a desk at one end, and, per Standard Operating Procedure, tons of couches arranged against all free wall space. The couches were populated by a dozen or so visitors, people we didn’t know, who were both together and separately in an ambiguous state of meeting with the official we had come to see: The Health Directorate.

We took up arbitrary seats on couches where seats were available. This scattered Sita Ram far on a westward couch, while Rajendra, Rajendra’s shower slippers, and I secured side by side perches on an eastward couch. From there on out, in order for us to talk to Sita Ram, we had to either sign or speak very loudly over cross-talk from the northward visitors, who occupied the longest line of couches and either were or were not meeting with the Health Directorate, and may or may not have all been a single group with a unified agenda. There was no way to tell. Luckily, our former director Nabaraj was able to sit nearby me, on the adjacent westward couch, with only a fat faux-leather arm separating us, which made for good chatting and time to assess the situation.

We remained in this configuration for some time, until the room quieted and, based on a cue I could not identify, the Health Directorate affably invited us to introduce ourselves.

All of the people on all of the couches remained at their stations as we took the floor from our arbitrary seats among them.

Sita Ram went first, and then Rajendra. And then it fell to me to introduce myself and provide a general history and outline of our project, and why we were at the Health Division. In Nepali, with all the important couches watching.

The Health Directorate was gracious and curious. He asked us a series of astute questions about the need for primary oral health services in Nepal and about evidence and evaluation for our project model. He has a PhD in the sciences and absorbed our answers thoughtfully.

“You are here,” he said, “at the right time.”

We held our breaths. This was a good start.

Suddenly, the door opened and a group of men walked in.

All the heads on all the couches rotated toward the door.

“Namaskar, sir!” exclaimed a young, brisk man at the front of the group. The Health Directorate rose to meet them.

“We have brought you” –the young man held out a package, importantly– “a Christmas Cake!”

A murmur rippled across all of the couches of people. The Health Directorate reached out to receive a festive box. He thanked the men profusely. Without disrupting our key role as a riveted audience, I was able to lean over to Nabaraj and deduce that the men had come from a local hotel where the government hosts many of its meetings and gatherings.

“A Christmas Cake!” exclaimed the Health Directorate. “How wonderful!”

“How wonderful!” hummed the Couch Sea.

It was decided in short order to adjourn to the next room for Cristmas Cake. The entire room of people rose and passed through a door behind the Health Directorate’s desk, which led us in to a board room with a long, shiny table. The Health Directorate sat down at the head of the table; Rajendra, Sita Ram and I took seats all the way near the other end, and the as-yet-unidentified substantial company filled up the positions in between. The hoteliers huddled around the Health Directorate and bowed their heads over the Christmas Cake box, which was opened delicately to reveal a white iced fruit-cake with a neat candy-cane trim.

Paper plates were produced out of nowhere.

The Health Directorate began the careful process of dividing the roughly 6-inch cake in to precisely calibrated slices for the large room of attendees. Each offering was gravely placed upon a paper plate and passed to the right. Each person then continued passing the plate until it had circulated the long board table and ended up with the person sitting to the left of the Health Directorate. The Christmas Cake circulation continued thusly until all had been served. To the best of my knowledge, there was not a single Christian in the room, including me.

“What delicious Christmas Cake,” we cooed in turn.

Back at the office later, everyone wasted no time in celebrating the shower slippers for their trip to the Province Offices today. “How’d it go?” the rest of the team asked.

“Amazing,” we said. “We have no idea what happened.”

I sat down at my desk to begin compiling our package of research articles.

*

 

 

 

 

 

Aamaa, Between Worlds, Didi and Bishnu, Family, Nepal Life, Reflections

Tuli Aamaa

, , , , , , , , 2 Comments

 

On December 12, Tuli Aamaa died. She was 94 years old and has been one of the oldest, most endearingly tired people I’ve ever known since I first met her seventeen years ago. Tuli Aamaa means “big mother” – in Nepali culture aunts are mother-figures, and they are either big or small depending on whether they are older or younger than your parent. Bishnu and Didi’s father was the youngest of five brothers, and Tuli Aamaa was his older sister-in-law. So she was our Big Mother.

Tuli Aamaa and her husband had settled down in the valley, just where the jungle path dumps us out on the highway in Pokhara. So when she came to visit us in Kaskikot, it was usually early in the morning, and she walked up the entire jungle path, a route that takes me about an hour of climbing at a good clip.  Tuli Aamaa would arrive with her walking stick and a litany of woes. These woes – and Bishnu will back me up on this – would have us giggling within minutes of her arrival and for a good while after she left. In a breathy exhausted voice, high pitched but only in the range of a dull butter knife, Tuli Aamaa would tell us, and anybody who was around, perhaps even the chicken or a wooden post holding up the porch or, barring these, the morning breeze, that everything was wrong with her, and it was enough already, it was time for her to die. She never looked pleased, and yet this activity brought her such return of satisfaction, or perhaps relief, that she hiked all the way up a mountain to participate in it, and then all the way back down the mountain a few hours later. It was wonderful.

Amazingly, Tuli Aamaa has always been the oldest person in the world, and she never got older. She looked just as old in 2005 as she did when I saw her last February, in 2019.

Tuli Aamaa with baby Pascal in 2005.

Tuli Aamaa with baby Pascal in 2005.

Yesterday, on the solstice, Didi and Pascal and I went out to Tuli Aamaa’s house, where her relatives are sitting kriya, the thirteen days of mourning. We sat outside talking with her son Ram Chandra dai, and found things here and there to help out with as callers came in and out of the house. Didi helped Tuli Aamaa’s daughter in law Tara bouju prepare her daily meal, which has to be cooked in a single pot during the kriya period.

And then the three of us left to walk up the jungle path, along the route that Tuli Aamaa always took to visit us. It’s also the way that Aamaa climbed after she gave birth to Didi 42 years ago in Tuli Aamaa’s fields. Aamaa took refuge briefly in Tuli Aamaa’s buffalo shed, before carrying her newborn, our Didi, up the mountain the very day of her birth. I have always been captivated by this story, but today it seemed phenomenal all over again, the traverses these generations have made over these stones. Pascal bounded up ahead of us, and found some luxurious blue maiyur feathers, and wanted me to take his picture with them behind his mom, standing on the same stones his grandmother once carried her over.

Later, I unearthed a picture of Tuli Aamaa’s field, and her famous buffalo shed, that I took when I was first introduced to these climbs and their histories back in 2005…

…and then I found one I’d taken the same day, in 2005, of Tuli Aamaa in the buffalo shed where Aamaa and Didi spent their first incredible moments together.

She looked just as old in this photo, as ever. As far as we could tell, she was always ready for this day, that to the vast majority of human beings seems a cliff edge, but to her was only another day.

We’ll miss you, and your loving, irrepressible climb through this world, Tuli Aamaa.

*