The Kapilvastu Free Health clinic (November 24-25)
We are not the only volunteers in Lumbini. Rather, it seems that the town, and the Metta network itself, has become a hotspot for volunteer activity the moment we arrived. By our second day there , we had already met three German girls, Lisa, Moana, and Tamara, during our tour of the Karuna girl’s college. The next day we met two more Germans, Vivi and Alex, recent high school graduates travelling Nepal doing various volunteer tasks. At this point, we knew more Germans than we did local Nepalis.
More volunteers arrived. At Lumbini’s premiere dining establishment, Lumbini City Restaurant, Schyuler and I sat in on the training of members of the Lumbini Emergency Network (LERN).
The first two volunteers, Alex Ulin and her boyfriend Max, were Americans who were working in separate parts of the country, assisting in a hospital and teaching English. I met Henry Ashworth, Max’s teaching partner and the lead trainer for LERN, next, when he told me (in Nepali) to wait a second after I knocked on the door of the restaurant’s bathroom. The fourth volunteer was Owen, a doctor Henry had met at med school in Ireland. They were all there for training, and for the upcoming medical clinic in Kapilvastu, a village fifty minutes from Lumbini.
We watched Owen, Alex, Max and Henry train four local volunteers, led by the Lumbini LERN coordinator, Mahesh Tripathi. They gave Schuyler and me a crash course in taking blood pressure and glucose levels, which would come in handy during the two-day clinic. Max and Henry showcased their acting skills by lying on the stairs outside the restaurant, pretending to be drunks who had broken their legs. It was all very entertaining and gave me a sense of being somewhat superfluous, unskilled and unable to help.
This sense of superfluousness stuck with me on the way to the clinic. Dr. Santschi wanted me to take pictures for documentation, and I hoped to do some recording there, but it felt unimportant compared to the doctors and medtechs there to prescribe medicine, take blood pressure, and address the villagers’ medical concerns.
Finally, after an hour of bumpy road, we arrived at the Kapilvastu health clinic. In the courtyard of a small school we set up benches, a water stations for patients, and a little daycare for the village kids.
The crowd arrived at noon, rural Nepalis old and young seeking medicine, blood pressure checks and re-assurance. (can you describe what this looked like, did they line up? What were they wearing? Did they stand quietly or talk to each other?) I roamed around and took pictures, Schuyler put together a water stand. Mahesh taught us the words for water (Panni) and eat/drink (Kaneh.) We taunted him endlessly[e1] with these new words. “Mahesh! Panni Kane!” we would say, offering him small cups of well water mixed with Emergen-C. “Na Kane!” He would reply, or occasionally “Bolli Pani Kaneh” (Tomorrow, I will drink.) We were already becoming fast friends.
By the end of the day, I felt somewhat less useless. I had hydrated some adults and entertained some children. It was nowhere near as urgent as what the medical staff were doing, but I was helping in some small way. That’s all we can hope for really, to help in our own small way.
The second day continued much apace with the first, though I had the chance to take blood pressure. We used an automatic device, so it was not hard. One man had a blood pressure so high that the device could not fully take it, and we quickly rushed him into the doctor’s office.
By the end of the day, the clinic had seen over 1000 people, and given out roughly the same number of prescriptions and medications.
We drove back past fires in surrounding fields. The villagers were burning the remnants of their previous crop, to fertilize the earth for the next one. The fires at dusk were a striking sight. I put on Mastodon’s Oblivion and listened as we drove. It seemed thematically appropriate. Some of the younger volunteers had mad plans to hang out with Mahesh and his friends at city restaurant later. We hoped to tag along, and celebrate the successful clinic.
But a few minutes later, on the ride back to Lumbini, our convoy of volunteers came across a motorcycle accident. I didn’t know what had happened at first, but Mahesh saw something out the window, opened the door and jumped out of the van before our driver had even come to a stop. It took almost 15 minutes for the rest of the LERN team to arrive with the motorbike and supplies.
A crowd of rubberneckers watched as the emergency technicians gently steadied the injured man’s limbs and placed him on a passing police transport for the hospital. If we hadn’t been passing by, he might have lain in the ditch till morning. I had a sense of helplessness, watching and waiting for the medics to arrive, frantically rifling through the back of our van for anything to help the responders. I just wanted to do something. But sometimes the most important thing you can do is to make way.