(Editor’s note: apologies if you’re on my email list and receiving this a second time.  It won’t happen too often.  If you’re not on my email list, you should be!  Please write “SUBSCRIBE” to laura@jevaia.org).

Good morning from sunny Pokhara!  I arrived yesterday and enjoyed a nice homecoming tour of all my regular haunts. Since August, Pascal has rigged up a home-made antenna on the roof, Aidan’s other front tooth has finally come in, and the corn has been cut down in the garden in front of our office, replaced with new seedlings.  I absolutely love this season in Nepal – the cold, wide air, the clear mountain skyline which is obscured by fog during the monsoon, the evening snuggles with my nephews under warm blankets.  Tonight I head up to beautiful Kaskikot to see Aamaa.

I’m so excited to tell you about our plans for this winter.  After 10 years of chipping away at all this, we are just days away from a two-week collaboration with dentists, researchers, and students from Berkley, UCSF, UConn and the University of Puthisastra in Cambodia. It is a strange and wonderful feeling to be preparing for such a large and qualified group of visitors after so many years of working away with few outside witnesses to our efforts.  There are many great things wrapped up in upcoming this ball of projects.

The first is helping to implement a UCSF/Berkley study of oral health and nutrition in mothers and their children.  Our own JOHC field teams will get to work with the researchers to conduct this study in one of our villages.  The second project is training our technicians in some new techniques, which they’ll incorporate in to their sustainable clinics.  Third, we have the chance to bring dentists to our rural clinics for medical audits.  Believe it or not, after an entire decade, this will be the first time we’ve had foreign dentists come to visit our clinics.  

And finally, we’re going to pilot an evaluation of past patients who’ve been treated by our technicians over the years.  If you don’t think that sounds like Christmas, listen here! This means comparing the outcomes achieved by our local dental technicians to the results produced by fully credentialed dentists in prior studies of the same treatment techniques.  This is a HUGE step towards our goal of having Nepal’s national health care system adopt rural dental clinics in to all of its health posts. Why? Thank you for asking!  Because the main criticism is that community-level health workers aren’t qualified to perform dental medicine…even though that excludes millions of people from care.  But we’re making the case that, rather than write off local health workers, the medical field must find ways to properly train them to provide the best care possible in their settings.  And that’s what we’re doing!

Ok, so those are the technical points.  Now let’s talk about me organizing for fourteen people to show up next week from California, Connecticut, India and Cambodia.  We have a schedule, a budget, a training plan, hotels, flights, and t-shirts.  We’re doing our best to keep things under control.  But we are up against the entropy of Nepal, people.  THE ENTROPY OF NEPAL.  Pretty much anything could derail our plans and contingency plans: a wedding, a political strike, rain, someone’s grandpa dying, a forestry meeting, a buffalo falling ill.  A buffalo having a baby.  A traffic jam.  A flat tire.  Lost luggage.  Fog on Sunday afternoon.  Somebody decided to drive this point home for me at the recently renovated, lusciously carpeted arrival terminal in the Kathmandu airport, which has a new row of fancy kiosks for visa filing:

On the plus side, sometimes fate works to your advantage.  Consider our office.  This fall, our landlord’s son got married.  The son received a number of couches by way of dowry.  They don’t fit in our landlord’s apartment, so I arrived to find them in our office, which now looks rather like a furniture store.  If you have any idea how much I have obsessed over the setup of our office, you will especially appreciate this stroke of….er….luck…

Well, in solidarity, I think I’ll leave you there on the edge of your seat.  Except for sharing a photo of this year’s Race to the Rock, which was one of our best yet.  If you missed it, please consider Jevaia in your end of year giving.  After all, we’ve made it this far – through many political trials combined with road mishaps, fuel strikes, weddings, earthquakes, and baby buffalos – almost exclusively on the wings of individual donors, and here we are entering a very exciting new chapter.  Thank you for being a part of the ride with me and all of us.

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