Start Talking

Alright. I am ready to start talking. Actually, I’m probably not going to do much talking about Nepal, folks, I’m sorry to say. I will be posting lots of pictures, and I have a few stories. But all in all, I spent most of the trip in a semi-conscious state of physical exhaustion, so there’s not too much to tell.  Or maybe you’ll just have to wait for the book. It always takes me a month or more to process a big trip, and this one was a real doozie. However, the transition back to American life this time has been a fascinating one this time around. That has some potential. Here are some warm-ups.

Having done so much travel in Asia, even rural parts of Asia, I wasn’t expecting the hard-core why-are-there-so-many-choices-in this-giant-retail-store reverse culture shock, and I didn’t have too much of it. Several of my students did, though, and I was reminded through them how real that shock is. I did experience tremendous jet-lag for the first time ever (possibly, this gets worse with age) and I am just now getting back to my 10pm-8am  sleeping pattern. (Hey, a girl needs her beauty sleep.)

Also, having been drastically ill for a significant portion of the trip, I had basically given up eating food, and I lost at least 15 pounds. I had thought that the food on the trek just wasn’t appetizing, until I came home and comfort foods here also didn’t taste right. For example, coffee, my former constant companion, tasted only like bitter poison, no matter how much sugar I put in it. Other things also didn’t taste right, as though there was some strange chemical reaction on my tongue.  I am happy to report that I am now drinking nearly a whole cup of coffee in the mornings (which SweetiePie is bringing me in bed).

I have also visited the chiropractor nine times. I have a pinched nerve in my neck, he says, which is causing my left hand to go numb for 20 minutes at a time, and the muscles behind my left shoulder blade to curl up into a golf-ball sized knot. This is probably not from carrying my small 10 lb. pack every day but it could be from swinging my 35 lb. duffel out of my tent every morning, or from one of the several falls I took on the muddy mountain trails. But he is a good doc and it is going away.

Before I left, I took SweetiePie’s excellent class on Economic Development, and I also did a fair amount of reading on my own in preparation to teach the class in Nepal. As a result, I saw some of Nepal’s  serious development problems, especially in health care and basic infastructure, in a whole new analytical light. Not since college have I been so angry at the INGO system. There is a post coming on that one, I can feel it already.

In short, once we left Kathmandu, we basically entered the middle ages. I’ll write more detail on this as well. I did experience some culture shock on this count, because despite having expected it and even seen it in smaller doses in South India, Northwestern Nepal was another world. No modern science has ever touched most of these people’s lives–no vaccines, no antibiotics, no Germ Theory  of disease; no metal plows; no insulated housing; no literacy; no Coca-cola T-shirts; no food preservation; no roads at all; no chairs; no water supply outside of groundwater; forget things like radios, electricity, and cell phones.

Just wait until you see the pictures.