Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Around the house pics

I'm not sure which order these will appear. My personal laptop went blind
(screen lamp dead) and there is no treatment available in Nepal. Therefore
it has taken some time to get some of my files etc retrieved from the hard
drive for posting to the blog. So, the white cement house is my home: No 4
Hansen House. Hansen was the Norwegian scientist that discovered the leprosy
bacteria. My friends may also have heard it before, since I worked at the
US National Hansens Disease Program in some capacity for around a decade or
so. J Looking up from my home on the right, there is the two story guest
house. There are 5 rooms with capacity to host a total of 11 people
comfortably. Higher up on the left is a small "canteen" on the edge of the
hospital driveway. I buy my eggs there, which are carried up in a crate
from the valley village below, Tikabhairab. Right now the going price is
roughly 10 cents an egg. The other pic is a current favorite: looking up
through the pines on a not-too-monsoon day, there is a rainbow about the
sun. J

It's that time of year again...

The monsoon rains make the grass grow. It can take days to cut a patch. In this picture is the largest stretch of flat space on the entire compound. So, even if someone had a lawnmower, it’s not as if it could be easily applied to the other 98% of the compound. But I think the method is maybe not so great for avoiding the leeches which stand on their tails and wait with gaping mouths for anything to pass by. Because they inject anesthetic first, you usually do not know unless you look or until they are finished and the blood just flows (from blood thinner) after they’ve gorged themselves. Pretty disgusting. Someone told me that tobacco juice wards them off, but since I do not spit…I keep to the clear areas as much as possible.