If You’re Having A Bad Day, Don’t Read This
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
The house is coming along. Every day we make a little progress and slowly this house is becoming a home. We’re starting with the necessities, pots, pans, and dishes, trash cans, beds, and mattresses. All of the glass is finally in the windows, we have electricity, a new stove, and a refrigerator on the way! We still don’t have water, so for now, we’re filling up buckets from our neighbor’s tap, which is working just fine.
Word has spread throughout the city. Every day many people are coming with some problem or another. It’s been really really difficult to get all of the information and get the real story, to know who is really poor, who is really desperate, to get proof and paperwork. There have been about 15-20 orphans who have come who are living with relatives, then there’s another category of children who are blind, deaf, and disabled, suffering from diseases, then there’s the trash pickers, the child laborers, orphans living as servants in other families’ homes. There have been at least 30 widows with 5 or 6 children who they can’t send to school, there are women whose husbands have left for India and haven’t returned, women whose husbands have taken another wife and left them, women who claim their husbands drink and abuse them. Many have come with serious diseases. They say they haven’t been able to afford treatment or see a doctor. Then there’s the street children who it’s almost impossible to get a story on, the kids who don’t even know how old they are, who don’t even know their mother or father’s name. Story, after story, after story. These days I can’t even walk to the market without being pulled in 10 different directions, without seeing something that sends shivers down my spine.
These next few weeks I really have to focus on making this house livable, working on my Nepali, and planning for the second story. I’ll be continuing to take interviews, go to houses, gather names and addresses, enroll children into school, and work with the people on the verge of survival. I found a little boy completely unconscious on the road yesterday and carried him to the hospital. When I got to the emergency room, the filthiest room I’ve ever seen in my life, there was no doctor and there were 10 idiot nurses/students who stared at me and didn’t even take the child from my arms. In our district, there are 5 doctors who rotate from Katmandu to Nepal Ganj. This week two of our doctors were in Nepal Ganj, and two of our doctors were in Katmandu, leaving us with one doctor. One doctor, and 28,000 people in this city, not counting all of the mountain districts that don’t have hospitals or facilities at all that come here for treatment.
The boy is okay now and I’ll be trying to contact a school in Nepal Ganj for mentally disabled children as soon as I get word that they’ll accept him. Yesterday I gave him the first bath he’s probably had in a year. He had thousands of lice. His body was filled with staph infections, scabies, open wounds, and bruises. He’s been sleeping in his own excrement, eating and drinking from the open sewer.
I’m tired. I’m overwhelmed and I don’t have more to say. I don’t like writing like this. I don’t like telling these stories.