Mero nahm Jennifer ho.

I have a Nepali vocabulary. It's very limited, and terribly mispronounced, but I've got it (on paper at least). Besides learning Nepali, I watched patient encounters led by the doctor, of which I understood little. Then I got to do some teaching of the nurses around pregnancy, as the patient came in on an off day, i.e. the OB doctor isn't in on Tuesdays.

And now for something a little more philosophical...
Talking with a volunteer medical resident today, I started to draw connections between working in Nepal and working in the prison. The patients are poor, although one could argue, not incorrectly, the poor living in America are not as poor as those living in Nepal. Whether as a result of poverty or lack of education leading to poverty, they are often disinterested in their health. They believe medicine (pills) is the way to better health, although medicine a) is not always the solution and b) is very expensive so is not to be used frivolously (about 1/5 the clinic's budget and a good chunk of the correctional health system's).

In Nepal, the patients aren't motivated to do what is asked of them in the way of getting tests because they are too expensive; for instance, a pregnancy test at the clinic in Nepal is Rs. 70, which is a little over a dollar. But when one's annual income is in the $200 range, that's a lot of money. In prison we've worked around that by making medical tests free, although practitioners take heat if they order too many expensive tests. Theoretically, the Nepalis could leave the country if they so desired, whereas those in prison cannot leave the prison, but logistically and financially that seems unlikely. The last commonality I came up with is that, like those in prison, the Nepalis _are_ trapped in their caste, like prisoners are so often trapped by their history of imprisonment. [\philosophy]

Battery's running low, can't charge it because the power's out as part of load-shedding. It should be back on by 2030 and now that I've got an international adapter, I have a prayer of getting the thing charged then. But for now, namaste.