of hospitals and namaste

Yesterday was the day. THE Day. We were going to see Everest. The transit strike had kept us from doing that on Sunday but we were determined not to leave Nepal unless we had seen Everest. We felt so bad though for Josiah because he was still sick! He had had his heart so set on going to Scheer Memorial Hospital to do some filming for his dad's Sunday morning Adventist talk show. Scheer Memorial Hospital is an Adventist hospital about 3hrs (or so we thought) from Kathmandu in a little town called Banepa.

As we were heading to the bus stop, Elle suggested we go to the hospital and take video on our cameras so we could surprise Joe with even a little footage. I thought about it for a sec and realized I had the little angel and devil sitting on my shoulders... Part of me wanted to see Everest so badly but we had also been told that if there's ANY fog in Nagarkot, we wouldn't be able to see anything. I also thought about how hard it must have been for Josiah to be sick in Nepal pretty much the whole time. My shoulder angel won in the end and Elle and I hopped on a bus heading to Banepa. Surprisingly enough, it only took an hour and a half to get there!

When we arrived in Banepa, we realized we didn't really know where we were going. We had listened to Pragun explain to Josiah how to get there and followed his directions as best as we could remember. We also stopped for directions with any traffic cop we could find. The hospital was about 2km from the bus stop and we found it with relative ease. At one point we actually walked right past it, but some friendly Nepali woman pointed us back in the right direction.


The hospital is so much more than I thought it was going to be. It was a big brick building buzzing with patients and doctors. We found out that about 90% of the doctors there are Nepali, which also means they are Hindu and not Adventist. There are 150 beds in the hospital but they see way more patients than that in a day. We met the man in charge of public affairs (nice older man from Oregon) and he told us to go to the physio department because a Canadian woman works there. We talked to her for awhile and then she had her Nepali husband (she's been in Nepal for 7years!) give us a tour around the hospital.

After the tour, he took us to meet the SM from Union College who was there for the week. Her name is Anna and she's our age. She is so sweet! We spent over an hour with her, just sharing different experiences back and forth. It was so awesome to talk with someone who knows completely what we are going through. We made rice and curry in her kitchen and then headed back to Kathmandu. Such a good day. God even lifted the fog on the way back to Kathmandu and we got to see the snow capped Himalayas :)


So this afternoon we are leaving on a jet plane.. Leaving this place of joy and hoping to bring some of that joy back to Bangladesh with us. My jeans are packed away and have been replaced by my seloar kameese... Sad day. I really loved Nepal.. I hope to come back and have enough money to do a trek--even if it's just overnight. But for now it's back to Dhaka, go in peace, namaste,
ami tomake bhalobashi