hi everyone! so i am back in thamel - which is the tourist section of kathmandu, and all of the volunteers come back to meet for the weekend. i've been in bouda (i think that's how you spell it) since tuesday afternoon, and living with my host family! tikki lama is the single woman we live with, and i have no idea how old she is, but if i had to guess i would say 60s or 70s. her cousin maya lives with her too, and maya thankfully speaks a little bit of english (aji, which means sister and tikki's nickname, knows no english). so that has been an adventure - melissa and i have been trying to learn nepali from my little phrase book - best 5 dollars i ever spent! if we didn't have that there would be a lot of silence. instead they laugh at our attempts to speak their language, and they are learning some english as well. so far i've learned about 10 nepali words, some phrases and numbers 1-10 :) it's kind of fun actually - i can even pick some up when we're at work (ok not much, mostly like "yes" and "no"). work has been interesting - i feel kind of useless because we're mostly just job shadowing and discussing what's going on with each patient with the doctors. however, this is a new placement and so not many of the doctors knew we were going to be there... so we have to kind of just make our own way! i've seen some interesting things - large facial tumors that you would never see in the west, COPD (which is like chronic asthma and emphysema), a lot of gastroenteritis, and this poor little girl with absesses all over her head. she looked like she had these huge zits everywhere (poor thing was about 2 or 3) because her head wasn't washed enough. so we watched the doctor poke the biggest one on her forehead and squish a TON of pus and blood out... sorry for those who don't like this... and i started to get really hot. really hot turned into really queasy so i decided to go sit down... i started blacking out and almost missed the chair i was trying to sit on... :( i nicely had about 15 witnesses all staring at me as i was trying to recover on a bench in the waiting room! a nurse came out and told me to start taking blood pressure, and it was nice to have the distraction! anyways, i'm a little freaked out about this whole becoming a doctor thing if i can't handle blood :( when i got home that night, it all really hit me - the differences, the noise, the pollution, the smell, tikki chanting her buddhist prayers, the nausea in my stomach, and really the whole experience in the ER... and well, i got a little emotional. i'm thinking about seeing this placement out for a week, and if things don't really get better, i might ask for a different placement. i really do feel quite useless, especially since this is supposed to be volunteer WORK... i just don't know what to do. advice, anyone?
on a happier note, i'm hopefully bungee jumping tomorrow! yeah! which reminds me, i need to go confirm that with the travel agent. i'll write more again!
miss you all :)