COUNTRY: Nepal
PROGRAM: UniBreak
PROJECT: Health & Teaching
WRITTEN BY: UniBreakers, Pokhara Nepal
We’ve come to the end of our 3rd week in Pokhara and we all just don’t know where the time has gone! Everyone has been spending some quality time with each of their Tibetan families this week, as we’re going to miss them when we leave!
We also said goodbye to two UniBreakers – Lottie and Bridget – who had to return to Adelaide to begin their final semester of Nursing.
By now everyone is in a great routine with his or her placements – enthusiasm is still high and everyone is learning so much! This week most of us also visited the Leprosy hospital – Green Pastures. Considering Leprosy does not exist anymore in Australia the experience was quite confronting. However, the hospital takes amazing care of the patients and all dressings are changed with impressive regularity.
The facilities are clean and the hospital even has its own prosthetics workshop, where prosthetic limbs are made for the patients largely free of charge. Despite the sadness and empathy we felt for the patients, overall the experience was positive due to the excellent conditions in the hospital and the cheeky smiles from the patients.
We had a farewell dinner together on Wednesday night for Lottie and Bridget, and farewelled them to Kathmandu on Thursday. The rest of the group spent the weekend hiking to Damphus with one of the local Tibetan guides – in our collective opinion it was a trek rather than a hike!
There were about 5,000,000,000 steep steps to climb before we reached ‘the top’, but then there were MORE! Let’s just say Nick will get a few ex-Antips patients wanting hip and knee replacements when he becomes an orthopaedic surgeon! Once we arrived in Damphus and recovered, we explored the village and the girls took part in a touch of sunbaking. The resulting burns are still being felt days later!
As it was our last weekend in Pokhara, we decided to harden up and go white water rafting as well! We received our safety brief, and then they let us loose on the river! Paddling gives you a wicked appetite and we had lunch by the river, made by our rafting guide and the kayakers in the ‘water ambulances’. Our new friends whipped up some homemade coleslaw, buffalo salami, homemade bread and buffalo cheese and we had sandwiches and bananas on the riverbank.
The July UniBreakers are thrill-seekers so we were all feeling a little bummed and bored before lunch – that was until we were thrown from the boat! Rafting is much more fun without a raft! When we made it back in one piece we were told there were no showers but told to pop across the road and shower in the waterfall.
No problems, sure thing! Only in Nepal. All in all we had a spectacular weekend and it was a great to have such a jam-packed final weekend.
Look out for our final blog post next week where we’ll be sharing our final thoughts and stories.
UniBreakers Pokhara Nepal
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