Kathmandu UniBreak Volunteers near the end of their placement

COUNTRY: Nepal
PROGRAM: UniBreak
PROJECT: Health & Teaching
WRITTEN BY: UniBreakers, Kathmandu, Nepal

After our weekend in Chitwan National Park we were two weeks into our time in Nepal and with two weeks to go! We all feel so at home now with our families and in Chapagaun, the locals are starting to get used to seeing us walking past each morning and afternoon and are greeting us with many Hello's and Namaste's.

The doctors and nurses at the Health Centre are so friendly and to have so many familiar faces in a foreign country is such a nice feeling.

After spending a few weeks at the Health Centre it has been really interesting to see the same patients coming in for wound cleaning and dressings to see how well or unwell they are healing. Many of the patient's wounds heal slower than they could due to the fact that they have little choice but to continue working on their rice fields and
getting the wounds continually wet and dirty.

The orphanage project that we're working on is going really good! The bedroom is completed- painting is finished, lino is layed, and the holes are patched up. We're just waiting on a carpenter to build a bookcase and cupboard and for the mattresses to be re-filled. Hopefully in the following week we will get to see the finished
toilet.

At the start of our placement, our mum asked Mary and I to cook a meal that we would eat at home in Australia for the family one night. We had so many ideas but there was a restriction on what we could cook because there is no oven and there are certain foods that the Nepalese don't eat. So we cooked chicken and buffalo sausage pizza's (as
requested by our brother's) on a pan with a lid over the top. Our family loved them! Even Grandma who has cooked her whole life, although when we were making a dough she couldn't help but give us a
hand.

This weekend our travels took us to Pokhara about a 7 hour bus ride away. The scenery was beautiful and made the long trip so much more enjoyable! Pokhara was the best place I've been so far! There was so much to do and we all wished that we could have spent so much longer than just a weekend there! The Himilaya's that surround Pokhara are amazing! In our time in Pokhara we saw the sunrise from a viewpoint
called Sarangkot, went canoeing on Phewa Lake, and the highlight of the weekend was paragliding off a mountain with Mary and Matt!! A couple of us hired bikes and went exploring to some waterfalls and caves, despite initially getting 20 meters down the road and having one of the bike chains break, nearly getting knocked over by countless
motorbikes and scooters and getting lost we made it back before dark.

It's monsoon season here now but we have been so lucky with the weather!! It has hardly rained and on the few times it has, it's been warm anyway so it doesn't matter too much, so for advice for future Antip's don't let the potentially bad weather stop you!

One more week to go! :(