A few more India/Nepal pictures.

I lucked out and have the opportunity to stay on the computer for a while longer, so I thought I'd take advantage and upload some more pictures.

The first is the big meat vendor part of the "new market", this might help explain why they are mostly vegetarian!!! The second is the entrance to the House of the Dying. The next are at our traditional Nepalese 13 course dinner. They had traditional dancers that would come out at the beginning of each of the appetizer courses. They then had a peacock puppet that would take money from people, and dancing, tickling, kissing yetis that also accepted small bills.

The next pictures are in Nepal as well. We hit a few historical religious sites on the way to Banepa where the hospital is. We visited the ancient palace site and the temple where the Kumari (the living goddess) lives, and she poked her head out for about 10 seconds since we paid 200 rupees to go in. Poor little thing looked miserable! The first pictures are the square outside the temple. The next ones are at monkey temple. Don't look too hard, it was too hot for the monkeys, so they were off sleeping somewhere in the trees. Our guide said this was the first time he had come there and not seen a monkey! They have the prayer wheels there around the shrine and they have some terraces with a beautiful panoramic view of Kathmandu.

I had to add a couple of pictures from the resort we are staying at. It is quite nice, beautiful grounds and most of the bungalows overlook the huge valley leading up to part of the Himalayas. The one picture is out our front window. Yesterday when we were done with breakfast, we came out to a film crew filming a pop music video on the premises, so that might give an idea of just how nice! The valley is so terribly polluted from Kathmandu being trapped in it, that it is only possible to see the 25,000+ peaks after an evening rain or when there are some good winds over near the mountains. They would be off in the distance in the white area to the right in the view. It would take a LOT of convincing to get me to go back to Calcutta as I have never seen someplace so filthy and polluted. Even though there is a lot of pollution in and around Kathmandu, Nepal is much, much cleaner and greener, and seems more laid back in most ways. I would definitely come back here. I also included a night shot with a 25 second exposure of the hillside in front of our place because I thought the lights were so cool.

Some more India/Nepal pictures

They have had us running on some pretty tight schedules and the place we are staying in Nepal is quite a ways out of town, so we don't have easy access to the internet, except when we are at the hospital. I'm going to upload a few more pictures and hopefully get to add some more narrative before we leave. I'll be working to catch up once we get back of course, but it is neat for family and friends to see things we are doing now.

These pictures are from our visit to the Living Springs orphanage. We attended and helped with church services there. We ate lunch with the children and toured the grounds. There was also a nearby brick factory. It is quite the throwback in time and space to the days of Moses. They are chopping the clay out of the ground with hand tools, loading it onto hand carts, then carrying it to the place were they mix it and make it into bricks. The men and women help carry the bricks to the underground kiln. The big smoke stack is the exhaust from the kilns. These folks are living near the bottom of the heap, mainly to have a place to sleep and enough food to get to the next day. Some of their children are sitting on a pile of bricks.

We were split up into to small groups to help out in various Mother Teresa locations, and the one I was assigned was the House of the Dying. Not everyone there was dying, some just had some really bad infections and didn't have any place else to recover properly, but most were dying. The men and women are separated, but to think in a city of 13+ million people, there are only 50 men that are dying and don't have a roof over their heads or food to eat surely isn't any where close to reality. I was allowed to take one picture and this is it.

Still in India...

Well, the internet cafe doesn't have USB ports so I'll have wait to upload more pictures until I can borrow the laptop again. The pictures below represent our travels the first day. We flew into Minneapolis, that's where Snoopy is, then we flew to Amsterdam, a 7 1/2 hour flight. They have a very beautiful airport and the country is so green! The group picture is a powwow before boarding in Amsterdam.

The flight from Amsterdam to Dehli went fine until we got to Dehli. There were some pretty bad storms going on, so the air traffic was all backed up. We were going to be circling for about 45 minutes, but since we had already flown about 8 hours, we were running low on fuel and the closest place a plane that size could land was just over the border in Pakistan.

We were expecting a half hour to refuel, but during the routine inspection they found something that had broken in flight and they had to send for a techinician. Another hour. Then we found out the KLM airlines had no preexisting business with Pakistan, so it took another 90 minutes to fax the requests and wait for approvals for payment, etc. We had to stay on the plane the whole time! UGH!!!

So we arrived in Dehli about 4 hours late which put our little road trip from Dehli to Agra to see the Taj Mahal in jeopardy since it's a five hour drive one-way. As you can see, we packed into the bus and spent an hour at the Taj Mahal. It was quite beautiful, but very rushed. When we got back to Dehli, all the flights had been delayed ue to strikes, so we sat in the airport for three hours after rushing back. Go figure. Time to go shopping today, so more later.

First Glance at India...

Our time has been pretty packed, so this is the first that I've had access to the internet. I'm in a hurry to get to supper and I'm borrowing someone's computer to do this, so I'll add more later. We got to everything we wanted to inspite of a 4 hour set back and an unexpected stop in Pakistan! More later... now a few pictures to temp you back.

Rachel...My Inspiration

Inspired me to blog
My wife, Rachel, started a family blog last fall and has been encouraging me to start one, especially as I begin my clinical rotation year.

My big start will be a medical mission trip to India and Nepal, so there will be many posts over the next month with pictures and bits of journal entries from that experience.


She had also wanted some nice pictures of her taken for some time now and since I just took them, I thought this would be a great first place to showcase them!

Inspiration to be a PA
After about 2 1/2 years of praying and pondering my career change, it was Rachel that had the revelation at our pediatrician's office. A PA student came in to examine Bekah and it struck her how much he looked like me (poor guy), and acted like me. The thought occurred to her that I could do that. After finding out what a PA is, and all the pre-requisite classes I had to take, about 6 years later, I've just finished the first two years of class time and I'm on my way out into the world to practice medicine on people for my last year!!!

Happy Mother's Day!!!