End of First Week

Each day that passes I become a little more acclimated to living in the remote village of Chanaute and I've started to feel more useful. After treating 2 people on Wednesday and 4 people on Thursday, I was also able to treat 10 people yesterday, so it felt really good to get busy and see that word is spreading that acupuncture is available again after 4 months without anyone since the earthquake. While I still feel very much like a stranger in a strange land, I'm starting to get to know the wonderful people here. Yesterday as I was treating one of the villagers a young boy was watching with keen interest. He then noticed the school supplies with pads of paper, pens and colored pencils that I had brought from Kathmandu. He smiled and gestured that he would like to have some. After I gave him some pads and pencils, I soon had a stream of kids coming to the clinic asking if they too could have some school supplies. It was awesome to see their excitement. Many of them stuck around for a while and watched as I treated more patients with acupuncture.




It seems most if not all the children learn English in school and some speak even better than the adults. I suspect this is because it's fresh in their minds while most of the adults lose the skill because they don't have a great deal of people to practice with or reason to keep up the language living in such a remote village. Later I met another 8 year old boy named Saugat who was friends with Bonnie, one of the past volunteers, and he spoke pretty good English as well. He found out later that I was giving out supplies and came by this morning to see if he could get some too! Of course I happily obliged him.
Saturday is my one day off each week. Today I went for a morning walk and I think the villagers are getting use to these strange westerners going for morning walks (the villagers walk all the time for work or to get around that the concept of walking for exercise and enjoyment is foreign to them). I know Bonnie always went for walks, so today when I passed a man he smiled and nodded when I told him I was doing a morning walk.



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