Back in Banepa

This past week, I made two visits back to the Kavre School in Banepa. It was the first time I visited the school since September, my first month in Nepal. In September, Melissa and I stayed in Dhulikhel, a small Newari town on the rim of the Kathmandu Valley. I wondered if the narrow streets and brick buildings would seem as magical as they did then, after five months here. I wasn't disappointed. I'm at the halfway point of my Fulbright experience, and returning to this place provided a sense of continuity for me.

Two visits to the school: my first to help prepare for a Rotary art project, under the supervision of Robert Rose (www.trifc.org), and my second was the art project itself, which included about a dozen American Rotary volunteers. Robert was instrumental in helping me get letters of affiliation for my project, and even wrote one himself. Robert has also been a dedicated volunteer in Nepal for more than a decade. Most of his projects benefit Nepalis who are deaf or have other disabilities. I had the chance to meet a blind Nepali woman named Nirmala, who did a Fulbright in Colorado a few years back. She is now working at a Bhutanese refugee camp in eastern Nepal. While I'm not a Rotarian myself, I was impressed with the community spirit of all the volunteers, many of whom have also volunteered in places as far flung as Guatemala and Ethiopia. Robert has projects both at the Naxal deaf school and the Kavre deaf school, as well as at the Durbar Newlife Center for children with disabilities.

This past Thursday, we made a visit to the Hospital and Rehabilitation Centre for Disabled Children in Nepal (hrdcnepal.org). Set on a hill above the town of Banepa with a view of the Himalaya, the center treats children from all over Nepal. Club foot is the most common ailment. Babies have their legs in casts to correct this condition, and their mothers sit in the sunny courtyards, breastfeeding them, or carrying them in slings. Other children have more serious conditions. Doctors were using a power saw to release a girl from her full body cast, and I could only wonder how long she had been imprisoned in there, and how she felt to be free again. There was a boy in the physical therapy room, standing between two bars for support, looking at a mirror. What does he think of his two prosthetic legs, or the fact that he was missing one arm? His therapist told us that this was the first day he'd ever been able to stand on his own.