Monthly Archives: September 2010

My impressions of Nepal are mixed

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I live in Boudha just 5 minutes away from the stupa. When walking to the Stupa of Boudhananth one can smell many sweet incense burning, fragrant flowers, urine, decaying flesh and rotting food all in one breath. There are many spiritual people, wealthy and poor, who visit the stupa daily to deepen their understanding of themselves and their religion. On the path there are people begging for money, including people deformed from leprosy, mothers asking for milk for their babies, children who tap you on the back and hold out their hand while they follow you on your errands and stray dogs begging for food.

The spectrum of disease in the clinic also has a wide range. There are people who simply come for elbow pain and headaches, then others who are crippled from accidents, abuse or stroke. Most people here do not come to acupuncture for internal medicine. This is just as well as our pharmacy is somewhat limited and invites creativity. For my patient with staph, the best that I could offer was Pu Ji Xiao Du Yin granules with Zhi Zi and San Huang San for his swollen ankle.

I brought a couple bottles of Zheng Gu Shui, White Flower Oil, and Po Sum On. In three days I have had the opportunity to use all of them. There is also a great opportunity for different acupuncture techniques here. Thanks to starting my trip with GAHP, all of my needling is free hand, including scalp, butt and ear needles. Last week I mostly used channel theory, but for the stroke and the paralysis patient, I used scalp acupuncture, for severe pain I used auricular, and for one sensitive patient I used Japanese techniques. SIOM was not always an easy experience, but I feel like it gave me many tools to begin my practice.

Living in the clinic is also a unique experience. I live here with three other volunteers who all come from France. We spend about 60% of our time together, more now that I am locked out of my room and sleeping in the boys ‘dorm’. My room is just above my friend Sudan’s room. He is 5 years old and lives in the hospice so that the nurses can take care of him while he undergoes chemo to treat his cancer. He is my pal. The day that I returned from the mountains, he followed me everywhere, helped me to carry my bags, showed me around the clinic and introduced me to the residence here. He does not speak English and I do not speak Nepali, but we get by just fine.

Despite his illness, he has more energy than any little kid I have ever met. He has his hands in everything and can travel from one side of the clinic to the other in a fraction of the time as the rest of us. The nights that he screams from the pain are difficult. Not because it is inconvenient but because it is hard to be so helpless in terms of relieving his suffering.

Living here is not always easy but, thus far, it is an enlightening experience.

Day 1

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I am in the kitchen with two of the French volunteers discussing whether or not snails are delicious. There is no shortage of company or entertainment here.

Today work at Shechen was very smooth. I work in the clinic with a woman named Sonam who helps to translate. It is very nice, she is studying acupuncture and very interested in helping to pull needles, or to do moxa, anything really. It’s like being able to be in two places at once.

The cases that we saw were very typical of the things I have seen thus far. Three of the patients complained of arthritis in their knees, three of back pain, one sciatica patient, several people complained of headaches, one low energy, one patient with shoulder pain, one case of ankle pain due to a staph infection and one wen dan tang case.

I am interested to follow up with all of them, but I am most curious about the wen dan tang fellow. He is in his mid thirties, complained of a left sided headache that started two years ago with a sharp ringing in his ears. At that time and since then, it is very easy for him to get startled and to have palpitations. He is fatigued and has poor sleep with lots of dreams, sometimes nightmares. Every time I went to needle him, before the needle would touch his skin, he would jump, make a squeaking noise as though he was in pain. We only have pills and granules in the clinic, so I gave him a weeks worth of herbal capsules.

We will see.

Returning to Kathmandu

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Since coming back from the mountains, I have been on ‘holiday’. It is extremely different in Kathmandu than in the mountains. In the mountains it was very quiet, I spent most evenings alone meditating or writing. Here at the Shechen clinic, it is quite the opposite. Every day I have breakfast, lunch and dinner with the other volunteers. There are three nurses and a physical therapist volunteering from France. It is far from quiet, there are dogs barking, people talking, horns beeping and occasionally someone rings the bell at the stupa down the street.

We have gone to a festival, a wedding and dinner parties together, it has been quite a lot of fun, but not very restful. We went to a festival in a nearby town that was for Hindu women to celebrate their husbands and to pray for them to have long and healthy lives, and for unmarried women to pray that they will find a good husband. The night before, all of the women partied and danced, then the day of the festival, they fasted and stood in line for hours to go to the temple. The line of women was so long that it wrapped many times around the city. There must have been thousands of women dressed in red praying for a good husband. There were also people dancing and singing in the street. It was a very crowded, but beautiful experience.

The people who work at the clinic are very kind. They come to my room and ask if I would like to go do this or that. Yesterday one of the employees asked me if i wanted to go with him to buy plants for the clinic. “Sure,” I thought, that sounded nice. After shopping for plants, having lunch in a nearby town and going to visit the sleeping Buddha statue, we returned 5 hours later. Just in time to leave for one of the employees weddings.

It was a very different experience than I expected. Everyone said the wedding would be like a party. “There will be music, food and dancing” they said. When we arrived, the families of the couple were sitting in a circle and the bride was saying goodbye to her old family and introducing herself to her new family. Many people were crying. There was food, but no dancing or music. It was very different than the wedding we witnessed at the sleeping Vishnu only hours earlier. At the other wedding, the women were dressed in red and they were laughing and smiling and everyone seemed very happy. It is a mystery to me.

Tomorrow I will start working in the clinic. When I asked Manoj if I will be busy or not, he said, “I don’t know, people call and ask about acupuncture, and I tell them to come on Wednesday.” I think it will be interesting. The acupuncturist who was here before me was seeing 25-35 patients a day, but he was not prescribing herbs. So we will see. I will try to post more on the topic in a week or so.

I hope that you are all well. Much love from Nepal, Tuesday.

I am back from the mountains

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Traveling with GAHP was an amazing experience. We went to two villages in Mustang where we were greeted with much kindness and many grateful faces.

View of Kagbeni from the Caves

From Kathmandu we took two planes and a jeep to get to our first destination, Kagbeni. Upon arrival we crossed paths with the other GAHP team and spent the afternoon checking out the village. At this time we hiked to several caves that overlook Kagbeni. Many monks come to these caves to meditate for days, months or even years.

The boys left early in the next morning and we five ladies prepared for treatment. Amongst the five of us there were three acupuncturists, one logistician, and an interpreter. We began setting up the room by lining one corner with benches for patients to wait. From there they would go to sit at a table with Jen who was triaging and Kunzom who helped with translation. They completed the interview, checked the tongue and pulse and then prescribed both herbs and acupuncture. The patient would then come to either Nini or I to get needled while Mataya searched for their herbs. All in all, it was a very smooth process.

We spent a day and a ½ treating in Kagbeni and a day and a ½ treating in Jharkot. We would have liked to have spent two full days at each site, but due to the mayhem that comes with traveling during monsoon season, we had to dedicate more time to traveling than expected. I’m not sure what our total numbers are because the team had to run, but I know that we treated over 200 people.

Many people hiked in to see us from nearby villages. On our last day in Jharkot we had intended on finishing by noon so that the team could hike out (due to local politics the jeeps were no longer allowed to drive to Jharkot). Despite our efforts to finish early, several groups of people arrived after a long walk to come to see us. So we continued, and continued, and we finished with the last group who ran to see us around 2-2:30pm.

Luckily the jeeps were still driving to the next town down the hill so we only had to walk a half hour to catch the jeep. At this point, the GAHP team left and I stayed in Jharkot for another week. This village is incredibly beautiful. It is like no place I have ever been before. The architecture is amazing. There are buildings that are more than six hundred years old, there are new stone buildings in the midst of their construction and there are buildings from the decades in between.

The roads here are dedicated to people, animals and occasionally motor bikes. From the hotel window everyday around 8am I saw the cows leaving for the hills and then the goats. Then around dinner time, you could hear the animals coming home and identify them by the different pitch of their bells as well as the number. Usually the cows would come in herds of 10 or so and the goats numbered between 30-50.

During the day I spent my time at the monastery teaching 11-14 year old kids English. They were actually very well spoken. Excluding the 11 students that I worked with, only two other people in the village spoke English. It was a very interesting experience as I do not speak Nepali, and even if I did it might not do me any good because they speak a different dialect in the hills than in the city. None-the-less, I got around fine with the few words that I knew and the few words that they knew. All and all it was a beautiful trip and I feel very lucky to have been able to spend an extra week Jharkot.