A fascinating Buddhist Stupa that includes statues of Hindu gods and goddesses and a statue of the Christian Mary (on the right.)  An all-inclusive religious site!

Typical Hindu street shrine

Josh at Sangita's house with his new little friends

Electrical wiring....Kathmandu practices "load shedding" which means that the electricity goes out for about 12 hours per day in each section of town.  Citizens use candles or flashlights to get around and in their homes during load shedding hours.

Typical Kathmandu street scene. Note the ever-present Hindu shine in the lower right.

Statue of the Christian Mary at a Buddhist shrine.

Woman at a Buddhist Stupa

Hanging out at the temples in Durbar Square

Feeding pigeons is good karma!

Hindu street shrine

Small Buddhist Stupa in the street

Tibetan Buddhist Stupa

Small Tibetan Buddhist Stupa

Typical Kathmandu street

Hindu street shrine. Devotees are putting colored powder on her as an offering on their way to work.

Street boys earn a little money searching for jewelry in the river where cremated ashes are placed.  People are sometimes burned with their jewelry on, so the boys are hired by someone to search the ashes with a magnet on a string.

Beggar at a Hindu Temple.  

Hindu temple area...each little building is devoted to a different god or goddess The entire area houses innumerable shrines.

Hindu symbols. There are remarkably similar to symbols used by the people of Ancient India long before Hinduism took its current form.

Hindu shrine and symbols

Fake holy men (for tourists). They'd have charged me 100 rupees if they'd seen me take this photo! 

Buddhist stupa and small shrines

Those of you familiar with the principles of Tibetan Buddhism will find this sign funny.

Tibetan Buddha

Tibetan Buddha

Josh had trouble following the instruction on this sign ("watch your head"). He was the tallest man in Nepal and doorways were not made for him!

Note the sign for the ever-present "Nirvana Cafe." There must be 100 Nirvana Cafe's in Kathmandu!

Citizens making offerings at a Buddhist Stupa.

Good karma is earned by feeding dogs, pigeons, and monkeys, so temples and stupas have lots of pets hanging around!

Butter candle blessings!

Stone carving artist

Pinkey and Binod's wonderful family!!! Pinkey is the ideal hostess and our HealthEd Representative for Nepal. She's also a phenomenal cook!

The view of Kathmandu from Pinkey's house.

Josh and I are nestled at our breakfast table in the hotel "garden" next to our Weber grill-type fire. Yes, Wisconsinites, we realize that you are experiencing FAR greater cold than we are, but you are also not wearing sandals! :) We spent the entire day yesterday at church experiencing Nepali Christianity and meeting with our health care volunteers. The elderly women in church are so loving and I received many hugs AND a Hall's cough drop! Today we're meeting with the leader of a Nepali non-profit who works with cookstoves for villagers.
The waiter in the hotel has been so friendly and wonderful to us all week. He is here day and night, so we've gotten to know him a bit and the only time he hasn't had a huge smile on his face was when the neighbors tried to kill us with carbon-monoxide fumes from a machine and he came to our rescue. His family lives in a far away village, where he visits every 3-4 months (wife and children). He lives here at the hotel (probably has a cheap room somewhere) and works 24/7 for the hotel. I'm guessing his pay is quite low and that he is supporting multiple family members. I can't imagine only visiting my family 3 times a year.

Funeral pyre at Hindu Temple

Street boys

Homeless people who 'live' at the temple

Today we visited a Hindu temple area comprised of many temples of various sizes dedicated to various gods and goddesses. A very low and very dirty river ran through the temple area, where there are many funeral pyres. This site was important to us because it is an area that "houses" a large number of homeless persons. Our home health care worker, Bimala, took us to see the work that she does for another NGO that serves homeless persons. The boys pictured above are among the many children who live on the street. They usually survive by picking pockets and stealing and are often addicted to sniffing glue.  We observed one of these little boys lying in a corner with a blanket sniffing glue.  

Disabled boy tied up

This severely disabled boy was tied to a building in the village when we walked past in the morning and was still tied there in the evening when we returned.  While this looks very cruel to the American eye, there are innumerable safety hazards in a mountain village that the parents (who are most likely working in the fields) are trying to avoid. Our health care workers were quite concerned about this boy and I suspect will follow up. There are authorities who deal with child abuse in Nepal that can be contacted, but the healthcare workers would first explore the situation.

Kids!

Big sibling getting some pants on for visitors!

Shy

where do we play?

Hiding from the scary white visitors because we have no pants on!!!

This is what you do when you don't have a soccer ball...blow up a plastic bag!

Trying to figure out how to bounce this thing!

Healthcare workers visiting mountain village

The little lady on the right in the lower photo is Pinkey Malla, our staff person in Nepal and one of our many visiting home health care nurses. Pinkey is a delightful little lady, full of love and laughter. The photo above shows three of our workers entering a typical mountain home perched on the edge of a precarious path. These are ladies that we trained as visiting nurses two years ago who live in Kathmandu, but make the trek to the villages to care for the families who have no access to health care.  Pinky brought candies for the children, who heard that she was coming and skipped school in order to play with her for the day!   In order to get to these mountain villages, the healthcare workers take a motorcycle or bus many hours to the "end of the road", where they walk across a VERY long suspension bridge that swings in the wind over plots of potato and rice fields, climb a perilously thin path up the mountain to the homes, where they stay overnight with the family.  They bring with them minor medicines, a lot of practical advice, and a huge heart for caring for the village people. I should add that Pinkey is an exceptional chungi player (the Nepali version of hackeysack), in spite of the fact that the "hackeysack" was made from a little bit of twisted wire.

Seamstress

Meet Kanchi Nepali! You might notice Kanchi's interesting surname. Nepali is the name of the sewing caste in Nepal, and we found her sitting cross-legged on the "front porch" creating a beautiful dress with her old hand-cranked sewing machine.   Kanchi is a traveling seamstress from a nearby village, who is currently living with the family that we visited in the mountain village of Dumre.  She resides with the family for a time, doing sewing for local families and then returns home or moves on to another location. She is paid in rice only after the crop is brought in. Being a member of the seamstress caste, a lower caste than the family we visited, Kanchi is not allowed to enter the kitchen during her stay. However, she spent the day laughing and chatting with the women of the family and playing with the children and seemed quite welcome and at home. 

Dumre, Nepal

We were honored to be welcomed into the home of a family living in the mountain village of Dumre, Nepal. These ladies are preparing a meal over the traditional cookstove found throughout Nepal.  The haze in this photo is the smoke that these women and children breath daily. HealthEd Connect is exploring potential cookstove solutions that will help alleviate the numerous health issues associated with the smoke.  Although this particular village is in a wooded area and has access to wood to burn, most Nepalese mold cow dung into patties or sticks to use as fuel.