Last Days in Nepal

Several weeks after returning to Ireland, I looked through the photos in my camera and found there were a bunch of pictures I meant to put in a final Nepal post that never made it online.  Two months after my departure, here are the last couple weeks I spent there.



This is Rupam, the three-year-old nephew of VolNepal's director.  He and his mother lived in the house with us and he spent a lot of time in our bedroom, eating, investigating our belongings and playing with my hand-crank rechargable flashlight.



The kids played a game sort of like jacks, with a bunch of pebbles on the floor and one in hand.  Rather than bouncing a ball, you toss your pebble in the air, swipe as many as you can from the floor, and catch your pebble again.



For the last two and a half weeks of my trip, I was stuck in the house with some sort of horrible jungle flu that I probably caught from the kids.  My co-volunteer, Mike, had the same thing.  It was awful.  Our hosts supplied me with the above products, and subjected me to a battery of local remedies.



Mike's birthday passed while we were home sick.  Rupam was definitely more excited than anyone else about this event. 

The Festival of Women happened around this time as well and the ladies of the house were happy to include all visiting women in the festivities, which involved henna tattoos on our palms, bangles for our wrists and a long religious ceremony (complete with holy cow brought by a neighbor) on the porch outside out bedroom window. 

I still hadn't recovered by the time I was due to leave, but I mustered the energy to go and say goodbye to the kids (whom I hadn't seen for two weeks already.)  This was a very sad occasion.

This is Anish, the director of VolNepal and one of the only motorcyclists in Nepal to wear a helmet.

Because of my illness, I couldn't do the post-volunteering traveling I had planned.  I was sorely disappointed.  As consolation, I accompanied the new batch of volunteers on their trip to Sauraha, though just for the elephant trek and one night's sleep.  To get there this time, we combined a local bus ride and a pony trap, which was a bumpy but more or less enjoyable ride.  The second elephant trek was similar to the first one but we did take a different route through the jungle and were able to spot some deer, peacocks, an alligator and a mama rhino bathing with her two-month-old baby.  Pretty cute.



I liberated these from the hotel in Sauraha.

I didn't fully recover from my illness until I'd been back in Ireland for about a week, at which point I gradually gained back the weight I lost from several weeks of dal bhat followed by two and a half weeks of eating almost nothing at all.  The henna faded, the string around my wrist from a previous holiday finally broke off.  But the experiences I had in Nepal stayed with me and I still think about them every day.