Some people recently steered me in the direction of a blog by a guy named Conor. It's excellent. He's going RTW. The blog is called "How Conor is spending all his money". I'm going to paste in below a small part of an entry he wrote (hope this is okay, figure it is since it's hosted on BnA).
He was volunteering at an orphanage in Nepal and a child needed to be taken to the hospital. He and another volunteer at the orphanage ended up having to stay the night at the hospital. The conditions were "challenging". This is what he wrote about trying to find a place to sleep that night.
quote:
I didn't tell her I hadn't yet found an extra bed. I had received the very reluctant permission of the nurse to sleep in a spare bed if I could find one, provided I was up very early and that nobody knew I was there. Fair enough. I wandered down the hall of the pediatric ward, and saw that all the rooms were the same - loaded with people, extremely brightly lit, and in the same condition that our room was in (which I will not describe in too much detail).
Eventually, I poked my head in a room and saw a bed that had obviously been recently vacated. All the lights were on, and there were several tired looking Nepali women breast-feeding their babies. I glanced at the sign: Maternity Ward. I glanced over the sheet taped to the door, spelling out the hospital's policy on breast feeding, and didn't find anything to indicate that a single guy couldn't share the room. I marched in.
Upon opening the door, everything in the room seemed to slow down as everybody watched me make my way across to the empty bed. It occured to me that probably the very last thing they had expected to see at 2 a.m. in their ward was a young white guy carrying two pathetic sheets walking over and climbing into the spare bed. I didn't think there was really a suble way to do this.
There was a sheet already on the bed, bunched up as though it had already been used. I figured that was a stroke of luck, I could use that one under me to cover the cold plastic. So with a sizable audience captivated by my every move, I used one hand to try to kind of spread that thing out on the bed, like I was running a B&B in the English countryside. Unfortunately for yours truly, the sheet did not turn out to be quite as blood-free as I like my sheets, and I kind of peeped "Yikes!" and pushed it off the side of the bed. Then, as casually as I could, I laid down, put the two sheets over me, put Dharma's school sweater down under my head, and curled up to sleep in that bright cold room, as everybody started talking in Nepali. I guess about me?
Most of his blog is really very funny. This particular entry is kind of uncharacteristic, but I thought interesting. The entries he wrote describing voluneering in the orphanage are quite moving.
His blog can be found here
Ooops. I forgot to mention that this excerpt came from an entry titled "Patan: Return to a Nepalese Hospital", in the Nepal category (obviously).
