Why Going to a Hospital in Rural Nepal Can Be a Pain in the Ass

Everest!

The Gnarliest of Truck Drivers Wouldn't Want A Piece Of Nepali Roads

 Nepal not only holds claim to being, as a fairly well-educated redneck would say in a long drawn out voice,  the birthplace of the funny looking  fat guy on them statues, Buddha.  Nepal also has within its borders, eight of the world's top ten mountains in elevation. (List of top 10 mountains here)  On a clear day, the mountains offer unheralded beauty from a tourist's perspective. However, these mountain roads where you can no longer smell the the traditional Nepali dish, momos , don't make travel very easy  Potholes on these mountain roads drop deeper and rounder than a heart attack patient's favorite Cinnabon roll with extra icing. dip into their stomach. :)

    As a matter of fact, the term highway in Nepal doesn't mean much more than,  a place that has a few less cows as pedestrians,than the regular streets.  A ninety kilometer bus ride, even from the capital city of Katmandu, will take you along stretches of highway that are barely wide enough for two bicycles, and definitely not wide enough for two extravagantly colored trucks from top of the truck to the bottom of the truck that seem to be everywhere in this country. Don't worry too much though about two trucks trying to squeeze past each other because the protocol is that if one truck punches through one of these narrow stretches of highway that they just beep their horn. Their horn always has a song that kind of sounds like the ice cream man is coming to town.

   Rumors in Bullshitville have it, that  many travelers on a long bus ride may even start to think, " Man, maybe next year I will listen to my in-laws, and just go on the cruise to the Bahamas." They think about this because a ship with five hundred thousand other people gorging themselves sounds better than watching trucks nearly collide every five hundred meters while playing the ice cream truck song.

  Scared passengers who gave up their shot at a family cruise could possibly find their bus buried in a mud pit on side of the "highway" just as quickly as they can leave the country with a beautiful nineteen year old bride under their arms.

  The amount of sheer abuse that mother nature pounds on one of the world's poorest countries in one year can barely be fathomed by some of us commoners. The country actually has five different climate zones ranging from tropical to arctic.

Monkey temple- at least these hold up to expectations :)

Nepal's Education System - Gets A Needs Improvement To Say The Least    

    Let us not forget one thing. Parents of children from countries like America don't exactly sit and go, "Hmm, how can we send Johnny to Nepal for school? " They also definitely are not sending him there for med school  Well, maybe if Johnny has kept the parents from enjoying a decent meal for the last five years due to his uncontrollable temper tantrums all at the wrong time, or other psyco-path issues that may make little Johnny a dickhead. Then, they might be tossing this idea around.  After the funny-looking fat guy on statues,  Buddha, most Westerners would have to dig deep into their brains to remember an influential Nepali in the world of academia.  To prove further what a real dickhead Johnny would have to be for his parents to send him to Nepal for his studies in this poorly-educated land, Wikipedia lists the illiteracy rate among Nepali women as less than fifty-nine percent.

   With little dickhead Johnny and his unloving parents gathering more facts about the dangers of this extremely uneducated area of the world,  we could also send the family on a tour through some of the smaller Nepali villages. Signs in almost every classroom pop up " NO to Child Marriage."  Most of the people reading this article will have a hard time understanding that this needs to be served as a reminder to anyone. It seems pretty simple to us that you should not get married as a child. These kinds of marriages come out of financial necessity. Even though I popped a few jokes about this horrific situation, it really does stab at the the center of my heart  to even see those kinds of signs in a school classroom.

  If you are still reading,  you probably are understanding a little more that you definitely would not exactly want to face any medical issues while in Nepal. It seems like more of a place that you would scare an ungrateful child like little dickhead Johnny into thinking he would have to go to than to have to rely on a heavily educated person in a time of need. It is not to say that no educated people exist also.  If you are a heavy enough Valium user, you may not think too much about an emergency medical visit.  The point is that the  checklist of things to do should fill with many other opportunities, like climbing Everest, Manislu, exploring the pristine Barun Valley,  or even going to the Monkey Temple in Katmandu. Anything is better than the idea of going to the doctor in Nepal.

Asia, Europe, and North Americans all in Sangachowk

Six Dudes From Three Different Continents

     If you have never been to Nepal, you can now get a small understanding of what the vibe on the street is like. There is not a nice way to put it. It is a pain in the ass to get around. It takes incredible amounts of time to travel more than a few kilometers. There is also unfortunately a noticeable difference in the level of education. They have some of the friendliest people you will ever meet. However, it is not uncommon to see a nine year old kid walking the streets begging for money. This all leaves travelers, like me, with a gut-wrenching feeling of what it would actually be like to have some kind of medical emergency.

    Before any medical threats loomed for one of the six characters,  this group of dudish dudes from three different continents assembled for volunteer work in a tiny town called Sangachowk, Nepal. The team came independently to work together on an Earth-bag technology project in this tiny village called Sangachowk.

   Sangachowk probably has less people than the capital city of Katmandu has snakes

   If you don't know what is Earth-bag technology, just think of people digging holes and putting the dirt in a big to serve as a foundation for a new building.

  This new technology came about to resist a new building's risk of crumbling in an earthquake. In 2015, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake battered an already desperate infrastructure and turned countless schools into nothing more than a pile of rubbish.

  This devastating earthquake that killed thousands of people did bring awareness to the need for a better way of building school especially. So, we all came to help finish the bathroom for this building that they were finishing on an elementary school while using the earth-bag technology.

 

A typical street scene in Sangachowk, Nepal

     So,  how exactly did this dynamic crew of six characters end up in  Sangachowk, Nepal?  Not everyone wants to go to a place with more cows in the street than cars in the street at times.
Sangachowk could also be famous , if it were ever to be famous for anything, for daily electricity cuts being  a way of life.

   To those of the readers who have journeyed in Asia a bit, you may be aware of   Workaway. Workaway offers volunteers a free place to stay and three meals a day in exchange for some basic volunteer work. It's basically a privileged white person's excuse to travel even cheaper in third world countries. It's like the $3/day hotels with a shower and private bathroom are not cheap enough.  The village of Sangachowk, Nepal, is one of those areas previously mentioned that might be 90 km,  but it still takes four hours by bus.

 

If the crew had a car

   
   The volunteers all called me, Uncle Josh. I saw it as a nice sign of respect. They might have seen at as smoke signal that I probably shouldn't still be doing this shit at 40 years old.

   Anyway, the youngest member of the workers went all the way down to 20 years in age. The youngest was named Yuri, the German Hippy, who the only thing he loved more than smoking cigarettes was to say, " India is just so FUNNY," With jacked up muscles and dreads down to his ass, he looked more than others like he belonged digging holes in the jungle.  At six feet two inches tall,  the Spaniard Marvelous Mario, owned a passion for jokes and salsa that kept everyone always wondering what kind of ridiculous story he would tell next. One of the more unique members of the group was one of the local Nepalis, who Marvelous Mario called, Color.  Color easily had the darkest skin of any Aboriginal Indian in the entire country of Nepal.  Color's most interesting personality characteristic was that he despised talking. He liked laughing. In two weeks of travelling with Color, he was only ever heard saying, " I really don't like people who are talking too much." The other local Nepal, Chico,  basically looked and exacted exactly like Cheech from Cheech and Chong.


Lunch Time Can Be A Pain In the ASS

The living conditions made us feel like a bunch of monks

     After two days of digging holes together, the dynamic group of six found themselves eating lunch together on a Tuesday afternoon. While eating, the flies tracked the scent of dirty dish water from miles away of this school canteen. The walls inside the canteen were quiet enough to hold a secret among the flies.

   Those same walls holding fly chatter also held a smell of rice and lentils mixed together along with stale curry that only can be known to those who have journeyed to Nepal. The crew of Earth-bag technology workers, mostly privileged white people, or hole diggers if you wish,  could have been solving a mystery of where a lost 3 million dollar sack of money within their reach for all Uncle Josh knew. He was on a whole different planet wallowing in his own pain and misery.

    As the crew shoveled the remaining bits of rice and lentils down their gullets, Uncle Josh could only think about the overwhelming pain in his ass. Each bite of the rice drug on longer than the last bite of the lentils.The warmth of the sauce, barely heated the cold rice, to a temperature of toleration.Eternal darkness blocked the sunlight from making any entrance into the canteen.Crawling cockroaches could be heard for anyone with open ears from the Canteen's kitchen. 

    No drastic changes happened,before Uncle Josh knew it was time to make an exit. Chico & Color had finally unlocked their hands. They held hands almost every afternoon during lunch. By the way, holding hands among straight men in Nepal is apparently very common, and not seen as a sign of homo-sexuality in Nepal.

Marvelous Mario continued to ramble some nonsense about how he left his company in the U.K that the investors of his company had sponsored him to start an entire new division. The rest of the volunteers preferred his jokes and salsa.

But, finally as we sat among dark, quiet,  and flies, Uncle Josh cupped his right ass cheek one last time to alleviate the pain. He had rocked back and forth trying to not let the cheek hit the seat to avoid a bolt of pain for what seemed like fifteen days. The rocking could have been thirty seconds.

Chico, "You need to take me to the doctor."

I wanted to cry

Cheer Up Uncle Josh- The Pain In The Ass Will Die Soon

  Nothing could stop the frantic pain, as his ass rested on the plywood of the school canteen’s finest dining room table. This was the canteen of the school that we were doing the earth bag technology project for.  A perk of spending six hours a day digging holes was free lunch served cold and stale.

  After beckoning to Chico to take him to the doctor, Uncle Josh wanted to know where oh where could this doctor be in a town with no paved roads, and in a town where eight hours ago, half the village was skinning a cow on the side of one of these dusty roads at sunrise. It seemed highly unlikely to find a talented doctor among this pack of heavens. 

This kind of ambulance would simply not exist

   Hospital=Shit Show in Rural Nepal

 A stumble out the front door of the school canteen that required all of the Westerners to duck down took everyone to the town hospital. We were all walking at the the speed of Chico, in other words the speed of Cheech. Uncle Josh could have wished that he hit his head on the way out of the canteen to deflect some of the pain from his ass for even a split second.

      The crew continued to move just as slow as the afternoon monsoon that was rolling above in the clouds, due to strike in two hours at its usual 4:50 p.m. time.  The team crossed the dusty street to see a lady outside draped in her vibrantly colored top, and scarf to go with it. The colors on the woman's shirt actually matched the purple and blue on the cell phone Wi-Fi recharge cards she was selling inside her store. It was a tremendous store that she was standing outside of. You could buy coke,cookies, bread, and cell phone minutes. Oh, and of course you could see the doctor in his hospital in the room behind the glass case that held the cell phone cards.  You could also buy beer.

      Uncle Josh limbered  to the back of the store, or as the doctor likes to call it, the hospital, to tell the doctor what was wrong. Josh proceeded to explain that he had an infected pimple. The pimple or skin infection, was probably the size of a  golf ball.  Chico translated all of this to the doctor. Then, Uncle Josh added that the infected pimple was actually on his ass.

      Doc didn't as much as smirk when he learned of the location of the infection. He promptly agreed to pay a house visit at 16:00. He probably only did the house visit because everyone on the street in the main area of town could actually see into the hospital area. This way,  the doctor could spare his patient from the horror of taking a needle in the ass  in front of a crowd.

     Thinking that there was no possible way that the doctor was actually going to make his way up the hill, and past the goats, to where Uncle Josh was actually staying, the doctor promptly arrived at 4 p.m. It seemed like a scene right out of those adorable farm books you read when you are a kid where the doctor has to try and save a boy's pig. Today, the doc was just trying to make my ass feel better.

    The curry stains on the doctor's black shirt made him look more like an assistant. The doctor's assistant dressed liked a Saudi businessman. He dressed so smooth he looked like he that was maybe about to talk some poor Aboriginal Indian in Sangachowk out of their land, so his company could drill oil on the land that was filled with beautiful rice paddies and views of the river 20 km away.

     In the same room that everyone slept, the doctor got right to work to violently attack this pain in the ass with a needle longer than a thumb and an index finger stretched out together. You could still smell the lentils on his breath from his afternoon meal as he made small talk with Chico. The old classroom where everyone all the volunteers slept on plywood tables that were turned into makeshift beds had ceilings high enough to drawn out screams of pain. Uncle Josh wished the assistant was actually the doctor.

  After the doctor deemed an area that was clean enough to inspect Uncle Josh's ass, the doctor went right for the needle before Uncle Josh could swat one of the dozens of flies away from above his head.

  The patient's eyes laid closed on top of the bed made out of wooden plywood. He wanted to fight off  the nerves of a looming needle with some kind of joke. As he thought of the joke, that he was going to tell the doctor to be nice, the doctor had already thrown the latex gloves on both of his hands to handle this situation. Not a word was spoken. The doctor got within 18 inches of the patient's infected area. That was when both of Josh's legs flew up like a donkey fighting off a mortal enemy. The legs flew faster, higher, and more violently than Chico and Color, the doctor's new assistance could manage to hold down.

    A deep breath was had by Uncle Josh. Now, he at least knew what was coming. A gigantic needle was going to be placed within six inches of his ass against an infected pimple more solid than Donald Trump's hair with a full head of hair spray.

  Another deep inhale came through his nostrils. He started to wish that he would have payed attention more in Yoga Class:)

  He didn't really know how to breathe when the fury of this needle was about to be dropped on him.  Is this what Little Rocket Man would feel like if Trump actually flicks the switch on the nuclear codes for North Korea?

  Before Josh knew it, he could actually hear the doctor grunting as the doctor struggled to move the needle through this infected area. He could see the beads of sweat dripping from the doctor's forehead even though he was behind him. He just knew that the doctor was also struggling.

    Through this chaos, Uncle Josh had buried his head into the bottom of his pillow and started screaming louder than the 20 foot ceiling could hold in, "MOTHER F**, GOD D**N IT, OH MY .." Ok, it will stop there just for your own ears. This intense battle between the needle and the cheek labored on for what felt like an eternity.

    It was as if the doctor was drilling to the center of his nervous system with a giant needle. Uncle Josh could see the little stars of pain in the corners of his closed eyes. Until, he finally yelled the only thing he knew this curry-stained t-shirt doctor man would know, "BREAK, BREAK, I NEED A BREAK."

 The doctor and Uncle Josh got to the fourth round. The same exact sequence of events happened three more times until the doctor finally took pity.

 The doctor turned to Chico, the translator, and said, " Here are some anti-biotics. I shouldn't have given him the needle today. The infection needed a few days to loosen up."

No SHIT!!!

That my friends, is why going to a hospital in rural Nepal can be a pain in the ass:)