So... Nepal

Well a lot has happened since I started work here in Kathmandu about a month ago. 

The flights over were painless - even pretty enjoyable. Cathay Pacific had good food and didn't lose any of my luggage, and my six hour layover in Hong Kong was enough to see some of the hectic Asian city. One thing stands out though. From JFK we flew right over the Arctic circle, and a little ways of seeing nothing bus ice out the window a voice came over the intercom asking if a doctor was on board. The EMT in me snapped to attention and I dutifully shuffled to the front of the plane in my complimentary socks. At the front of the plane I met an older gentleman with a stent who was having a chest and neck burning sensation after taking a dozen medications that morning, and believe it or not a radiologist Dartmouth alum. We tried calling for medical direction, but the call was cut and the flight attendant told me that we'd lost phone contact for two hours over the pole. Bummer. However the man's vitals were stable and he was fine otherwise, so we made sure someone kept watch on him and that a medic was waiting at the Hong Kong gate. I swear that since getting my EMT two years ago things like this follow me around.  

Moving in was a quick transition to a strange, new place.. oddly inhabited by a lot of Dartmouth students. I was driven back to the apartment that EcoSystems puts its intern up in, just south of Kathmandu, and met the two other interns at the time, Brendan Huang '08 (a physics major) and David Drennan '07 who finished his undergrad at Dartmouth and is doing the engineering-business masters degree. Also there was Rosie Hughes '07 who is working in Kathmandu for an NGO, the IRC, doing disaster relief work. The weekend was my introduction to Kathmandu and the smaller town of Patan where we live. 

For my very first day of work I was asked to come for a two-day bridge site visit 100km west of Kathmandu to do some maintenance and to try a new trolley design David Drennan had been working on. Traffic was thick and smelly for the first 50km out of the valley, then it opened up and we would go awhile without seeing other cars. The road usually followed a roughly 100m wide river with a precipitously sleep 100-200m bank in between them. I instantly saw why bridges are so important in rural Nepal - during the summer monsoons these deep but slow moving bodies of water are torrential rapids for months at a time, and bridges that go across are often miles apart and shaky wooden things at best. As we drove along, we would occasionally come to a nice, large suspension walking bridge that spanned the gap, but this would only be around a very large town and looked expensive given that nothing bigger than a cart could get across. Also, as we drove by I could see all the schools were on the road-side of the river, presumably for better access to supplies and maybe even teachers. 

This makes a pretty good case for the wire "cable-car" bridge design that EcoSystems built 8 years ago at the village Thumka. The design is 10-15% of the cost of a comparable suspension bridge, and in the two days we spent in Thumka was used by tons of villagers, most of whom were carrying large loads of crops to be sold at the market. Scanning the hillsides we could see houses and farms hundreds of meters up and all along the valley, and the nearest bridge to us could have been 10km in either direction along the river. It was pretty clear why in Three Cups of Tea, before Mortensen could build a school he had to build a bridge so kids could actually get to the school, and so villagers could actually sell their crops in market without the help of their children. 

What's also interesting about the bridges is that they're not donated by aid because EcoSystems is technically a company, if a nonprofit. This means that, with the help of the company and NGO's (non governmental organizations) the local villages have to raise funds or pay for some of the bridge themselves, so there is a sense of ownership and responsibility. I've heard from friends here that often when you just give a village solar panels and a battery, they use it until something breaks then throw it aside. But when we stayed in Thumka we also fixed a pedal-powered electric generator that had been carried 3 hours down from the mountains, because the village had paid for it and depended on it for power. 

The work was some of the hardest and sweatiest I had done in a long time, and when the villagers started to pile up with their groceries waiting for the bridge we would work even faster. But they seemed to know who we were and seemed to appreciate what we were doing, even if they were clearly confused why we were dismantling the whole thing for the sixth time. Thumka was a good manual labor introduction to Nepal. 

I've learned that the body can basically survive off lentils and rice and its not bad (dal bhaat, the national dish), the army thinks a Buddhist stupa is an okay place for a strategic 50 caliber gun post, the average Nepali is half my height and can carry an oversized refrigerator on his or her forehead, and to not eat anything that is given to you in suspiciously small portions.