Day 29: Cow Poop & Calamine
Trip Start
May 20, 2008
1
23
77
Trip End
Aug 19, 2008
Kathmandu,
Nepal
Thursday, June 19, 2008
After this errand, I hopped on a bus back to Pepsikola where I rendezvoused with Emily & Lindsey for a bus trip up to OCRC. The kids up there are doing fine, but Sumit's chicken pox have gotten worse. After catching him using a sharp broken Lego brick to scratch breakouts on his arm, I shuttled him over to the medicine cabinet for some good ole calamine lotion. The lotion they have here is a bit cruder than the usual "rub until it disappears!" stuff back home, it was this bright pink, watery liquid with no instructions on how in should be used. The medical volunteers would know, but none of them were present. In a Battlestar -ish "I'm nyot a Doctor, sire!" Tigh : "Today you arrre ." moment (sort of), I grabbed some latex gloves, cotton balls, got them damp with calamwhatever , and started patting poor Sumit's arm down. The messy stuff seemed to help, but I wasn't completely sure if I applied it correctly or in the correct quantities. In any case, it was better than leaving him with the Lego brick. Elsewhere, the kids playing around outside started fixing giant banana leaves to their clothes. One girl made a mock-hula dress out of them, two boys stuck the leaves into their hoods like animal ears and started bouncing around bunny-rabbit style... great imaginative fun it was.
After a couple hours of playtime and some chatting with the older, less ADD orphans, we headed back to Pepsikola. It was on this journey that an errant cow whacked some manure on me with his tail, wrecking that NYC Subway shirt I wuv so much. I'm badly overdue for laundry anyway, so that'll give me good motivation to brave the manual washboards and do it. Brief hand-sanitizing followed, then a candle-lit hangout at the Hut to wish Christine a good rafting trip. It was one of the best Hut hangouts to date, with many giggles about toxic Indian beaches (the Brits were planning on traveling there after Nepal) and scary flights into Kathmandu. Apparently the pilot on Andy's flight circled the city for hours until the weather
cleared, invoking God repeatedly when making update announcements over the intercom. ("God willing, we will land." - direct quote) Singapore Air must be even better than I already thought it was, my flight landed right away without incident when I arrived way back when a month ago. Everyone else ran into this or that trouble.
Out of time, that's all for now.
----Vital Signs----
Mosquito Bites = 53
Yetis Scalped = 7
Tibetans Freed = 12,453
