Wrapping Up

Today has been the first chilly day here in a long time, and it finally feels like fall. The hurricane off the east coast of India seems to have hit Nepal, and its been raining for 8 hours straight, so I’ve been cuddled in a blanket drinking multiple cups of tea and coffee today. Last week Bishnu and I held a VDC-wide mushroom training for 27 women. 

With Kamala, one of my favorites from a nearby ward at mushroom training

We chose 3 women from 9 villages and over the course of 2 days, they were trained in mushroom cultivation. It was a crazy 2 days, but went extremely well. Also my VDC (Village Development Committee) office is on the top of a mountain, so there was lots of uphill climbing involved. With the generous support of the Chopera family (thank you fellow PCV Nick Sung for helping with that!) and assistance from the district agriculture office, we brought in a mushroom trainer from our district headquarters. At the end of the training, each women was given plastic and a bag of seeds to then teach others. Two days after the training I was on a bus with 3 of the women who attended the training, and they had already had their own agriculture meeting and taught their fellow group members! It was great to hear that and since mushrooms sell for such a high price around here, it might allow some of the women to increase their incomes. I’ll have to let the incoming volunteer monitor that and hopefully we see some results!

Thank you Chopera family for your generous donation!

Counterpart Megaraj and I at first day of mushroom training!

With school staff in Udiyachaur, Pelakot at the library Taylor, Vivian, and Prakash built

The day after the training I hung out at home and did much-needed laundry, but the next morning I got up at 5:30am to travel to Pelakot, the neighboring VDC. This is where my sister Taylor and her friends from Geneva came to implement a multi-media center back in June. I arrived around 8:30am and had daal bhat with Prakash’s family (Taylor’s friend from graduate school and whose village this library was in) and then walked up to the school with his dad and sister. The library looked awesome…the school had done a great job of keeping it clean and neat and everything seemed to be working ok. Taylor and her friends had sent me some videos to show the kids, but we had some major issues getting the projector to work and ended up having over an hour Skype conversation from Nepal to Switzerland! I think I unfortunately woke up poor Prakash, but we were able to fix the problem and then all the kids crammed in the room to hear messages from Taylor, Vivian, and Prakash.  Although the video was pre-recorded, I think the kids thought it was live because they were waving goodbye at the end of the video…it was super cute. I spent the majority of the day at the school fixing catalogue problems and just making sure everything was ok and that the teachers understood how to check out books etc. The school is so dedicated..it made me want to be a PCV teacher there!  I actually found out a Peace Corps volunteer had been placed there about 10 years ago, which was pretty cool, as they knew a little about the work I was doing here. I got weirdly emotional leaving the school and all the kids….its not even my school, and I had only met the kids a handful of times, but I think it was also more a sadness of leaving Nepal that came out. The kids all waved bye and said they would see me soon, not knowing that I was leaving in a short week. Saying goodbye to Prakash’s family was also hard and knowing you are saying goodbye to people for good is really, really hard. After I left his house I had about a 40 minute walk back to the main road and met up with my friend Rita to have tea before catching my bus. I think I had written about her in one of my first posts from 2 years ago, but she used to live in my village, then had a baby, then moved in with her sister in Bhaytari, where I would catch my bus. I hadn’t seen her in a while so it was good to catch up and see her now 14-month old! We had tea and biscuits and had a mini photo shoot and then it was time to leave. I hugged her goodbye and then proceeded to cry the entire half hour bus ride back to my village. 

Rita and I 

View of Bhayatari from Rita's house

Totally unexpected but it was really the first time I had to start saying goodbye to people and it just really hit me all at once that this experience was ending. Leaving Nepal is nothing like leaving home. Leaving home was god awful, but I knew I was coming back in 2 years. Leaving Nepal kind of feels like someone is ripping out a part of me…I just don’t know when Im going to get back, that’s the worst part about it.

So….yeah. Basically leaving sucks. But now, for more exciting news regarding my alien rash. Rewind 2 weeks ago and I was in Pokhara closing out my grant and celebrating a fellow volunteer’s birthday. Previous to coming to Pokhara I had some sort of cold/virus thing for 3 days but felt mostly fine. Sore throat, sneezing, runny nose...your basic cold. However, the day I left Pokhara I noticed I had a rash on my stomach but thought it was due to sleeping on a bed with questionable sheets. By the time I got home that night it was full blown body rash, literally covering me everywhere but my face. I wasn’t really that worried honestly because 1. I live in Nepal 2. I have insanely sensitive skin and 3. Nothing a Benadryl couldn’t fix. WRONG. I took Benadryl for a week straight and nothing happened. I finally admitted defeat and called the Peace Corps doctor who, after sending her pictures, proceeded to tell me I had an entire body staph infection and then put me immediately on antibiotics. 3 days later…no result. So I got put on a stronger antibiotic, Cipro, which essentially kills everything in your body. 2 days later..no result. At this point I literally thought I had antibiotic resistant staph all over me and Peace Corps told me I had to come to Kathmandu, which was the last thing I wanted to do with 2 weeks left in village. Also, Dashain (Nepal’s biggest festival) had started and traveling would be hell. I was right about that. I took a 6:30am bus out of village and didn’t reach Kathmandu until 8:30pm. It was terrible…I killed my Ipod, iphone, and read my entire book on that damn bus. The traffic coming into Kathmandu was unreal and in a city where stop lights and zero traffic laws exist it was unbearable. I went to see the Peace Corps doctor immediately the next morning where THANK THE LORD ABOVE I learned I did NOT have staph, but rather had some sort of freak reaction to the sore throat virus I had had the previous week. So they took me to the hospital to see a dermatologist and now I’m on Prednisone steroids for an entire month to try and get rid of this thing. Good news is the rash is self-limiting and will go away by itself within 6 weeks, but I kindly told the doctor I was going to be on a beach in Thailand in under a month and really did not want to look like a leper so she upped my steroid dose to try and speed this process up. It really does look like an alien rash though. At least it did not reach my face but shittttttt I looked real diseased for a while. Still kind of think I might be at leper status in Thailand but what can you do. #peacecorpsproblems

So I hung out in Kathmandu for 2 more days to make sure I didn’t get worse or react to the Prednisone and then PC sent me back to village. Except that since it was Dashain all the tourist buses were full so I actually ended up flying back to Pokhara and getting a bus from there. 8 hour bus ride in 25 minutes…it was great. I got back to village late that night, right in time for the biggest day of Dashain the following day, where everyone gives you tikka as a blessing. Spent the next day having a great last Dashain…I visited most of my village and got boatloads of tikka all over the place and got to eat my favorite kind of roti (which tastes like funnel cake..delicious) and basically just hang out with my favorite people.

Bishnu giving me tikka on Dashain

Aastha and I before tikka

Oh, heres a picture of the finished collection center! I think it looks awesome and I’m super proud of it!

Now back to the present…7 days left and then its off to Pokhara for a couple days (submitting grad school apps!), a quick trip up to Sindhulpalchowk for a night with my old homestay family, then closing out Peace Corps related things in the office in Kathmandu, and then a November 1^st flight out to Bangkok with my friends Chad and Voranan (we went to India together). Im really just trying to pack and get my stuffall together right now in village, preparing myself for the inevitable goodbyes coming up this week. My community is throwing me a huge celebration/goodbye ceremony on Thursday so I will likely be crying throughout that. Oh man. This is just so surreal. Also thanks guys, I’ve now reached over 20,000 hits on my blog!

Lots of love from this beautiful place,

Alex