About 40 Hindi-speaking families from north India live a short walk from our hostel. They came here to find work (apparently, it is all relative) in the form of begging, shoe shine, and cotton mattress stuffing. Five kids from this camp go to Kai and Aaryn’s school. They receive sponsorship for school fees, uniforms and books. They have all lived here for about 5 years. When one of the boys became sick, I was taken to their home and was introduced to the squalor of living in a tent.
With donations from SEDIC—The Sherpa Education Development and Information Center, a 12 women run community organization—one doctor, one nurse, a security guy and myself, went back to the tents for on-site clinic care with two buckets of medicine. Again, as in Thuman village, looking around, it is easy to become cynical and discouraged because what is the point of treating anyone if they have no clean water, and everyone has something to catch. But at least in Thuman, there is that “poor-village life” “celebrated as the natural, happy domain of man (sic) by thinkers from Lao-tzu to Gandhi”—I read it somewhere.
A latrine has been set up at the edge of the tents. Cooking is done in the tent over a kitchen fire. The tents are open to one side and blue plastic tarp and bamboo stakes form the back and side walls. The tents regularly burn down and need to be built again.
In the center of the tent community is a pump for water. Washing dishes and bathing are done here. Every tent contains an extended family, everyone is called auntie, and many husbands are gone. Women and children make up the begging contingent and young boys, the shoe shiners, and the few men, the mattress stuffers.
Eighty people were assessed for upper respiratory tract infection, worms, diarrhea and vomiting. Two women were referred to hospital for more tests. For those with minor complaints, cough syrup and eye drops were handed out to ease the symptoms of cooking over a kitchen fire.
Unfortunately, with these folks, breastfeeding is not a valued form of infant feeding (unlike everywhere else in Nepal, infants are breastfed until they are two years, and solid foods are introduced at 6 months—just like the World Health Organization recommends). There is a product here called Horlicks—it is a malt drink to which you add water. Many people like to feed it to their children and children like it because it has sugar as the first ingredient. Whether or not there is any special nutritional value—when you add dirty water to it—it will make the child sick. At the tents, mothers like to give it to their babies, and after a few days, the mix is finished, the mother’s milk supply has dropped and the baby often won’t go back to breast. So she needs to get more Horlicks—which is of course, expensive—kind of how I perceive the cocaine situation in Manhattan.
Though as discouraging as it could be, there are little treasures of hope. The five kids going to school work hard and do well. I marvel at their clean uniforms that put my own uniform-washing abilities to shame. In the tent we used as a clinic, there was a poster up of the Devanagari script—used for both Hindi and Nepali—just like any attentive parent at home would have. And they are all a very gentle, scrappy bunch who help each other out when one of the tents burn down or when a windfall of Horlicks or rice come their way.
