As I started to say in my last post

As I started to say in my last post, when I was so rudely interrupted by a blown fuse, I have been very busy. I didn’t set out to be busy, in fact one of the things I like about Nepal is I have very little to do. Having so little to do has made me wonder how I ever did all the things I did while living in Boston. Guess I’ll find out when I return in June, eh?

I think I mentioned that I hung out with my friend Caroline at her work on Tuesday. It was partially a self-edification mission and part clinic-related. I experienced what Caroline does, and I brought back staff and patient education materials about maternal health for the clinic. Now to pull together a teaching about the materials… (I’ve been slacking and haven’t done a teaching for five weeks – time to make good on my commitment to do a few more before I’ve completed my volunteership at the beginning of May).

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This past weekend I didn’t do a teaching for lack of preparation time because Mark and I went to Bhaktapur Durbar Square Saturday. It’s the former royal palace of the city of Bhaktapur, about 45 minutes by motorbike southeast of Kathmandu. There’s an entrance fee to most of the Durbar Squares, and this one is no exception, so we paid the fee and wandered about. Here more than in Bouhda, or even Thamel (the tourist section of Kathmandu), the beggars and sellers are vicious!

It seemed that every child who approached us wanted to take us to her thanka (predominantly religious paintings of, I think, a Buddhist origins) painting school, where we would have been pressured to buy a painting (and the kid probably would have gotten a commission). The sellers are equally aggressive; if a passer-by (i.e. foreigner) even looks in the direction of her stall, the seller offers products at “lowest price just for you” on “most good [insert name of handicraft here] – other [handicraft] no good.” I can appreciate trying to make a living, but I was exhausted by the end of the day from warding off the onslaught of capitalism.

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Finally, the news you’ve all been waiting for… it seems (at careful glance and from four days in the future) that the first Nepali elections in 10 years are moving forward. As you may have read in Mark’s blog, the involved parties have announced a no-weapons policy; transportation and alcohol consumption have been banned starting Tuesday and Monday, respectively, through Thursday; and government employees have been threatened with termination (job termination, that is) if they don’t show up to their assigned election posts. I’m just sad I can’t vote… this is better than American politics by far!