Nessing Nepal

We head out to Nessing which is straight up the mountain. Once we reach the top, we are required to go down the other side, up another peak and down the side of that peak and then up again to reach our destination. This takes us about 3 hours. It is starting to get dark around 5:30pm. We meet pastor Kunni who brings us a load of fire wood and we don’t see him again until morning. We are going to stay in the church for 2 nights and we have to cook our own food.
Having a wood stove sounds great and it does keep you warm while the fire is raging inside the stove but there is no heat to be had in the building because it is drafty and the fairly open at the top.The building is constructed of stones piled one upon the other and you can see daylight through the walls and where the tin roof meets the walls. The woodstove has two holes in the top and the Nepalese people leave the lids off so the fire comes up along with the smoke. We actually need a drafty building so we can have some kind of air quality.

For supper we are going to have chicken soup with rice. Chicken soup is not what you are thinking if you are from Canada. First of all, we have a local chicken which we buy from a local. He brings the chicken live and outside I hear the pitiful cry of the chicken as his head is getting severed. Next the chicken is getting gutted and de-feathered and eventually they bring in a scrawny local chicken of which the hold in the fire to burn off the pin feathers. The last day we buy one more chicken and they actually drop it in the fire for about 30 seconds. The first chicken, Raju takes half for tonight’s supper and just chops it up into little pieces; bones and all. All we really have left is several pieces you can fit in one hand. Putting that aside, you get a pot, add some oil, onions, garlic and ginger. Once that is sautéd you add the chicken and eventually some water. After a while we have about 16ozs of soup.

While this is being prepared they have previously boiled a huge pot of rice. They also take local lentils and make lentil soup. Again, it is about 16oz. Once supper is declared ready, you take a plate and add a pile of rice. Next you take a small bowl of chicken soup and you use it like as gravy on the rice. You do the same with the lentil soup. So we eat rice with chicken soup gravy and lentil soup gravy. Every piece of chicken is more bone than meat and I surmise that it is more for the flavour than the food value. The other half of the chicken is left hanging over the fire to dry out. Raju prefers it dry. Sometimes he just lays it on the stove, and sometimes he hangs it over the open flame. Once he dropped it in the fire and it took about 40 seconds to retrieve it. He was proud of how tomorrow night’s dinner was shaping up.

Here is a picture with Pastor Kuni and I.

Raju and Hari both state that they cannot live without rice. They are never satisfied until they have a good fill of rice. Every restaurant meal we ended up having they ordered the exact same dish. They call it by two different names; Bhat and Khana. There were a few variations; mutton or pork substituted for the chicken and some vegetables added. But they love that dish. In fact, at Nessing we had it for both evening meals and for breakfast the day we left. It actually is not a traditional Nepalese meal but an Indian meal.
Almost every home in the village has an open fire in their one room living space with very few having some kind of a chimney. As we visited from home to home, we were assaulted by smoke. The inside ceiling of the house had a thick layer of creosol (black tar/soot deposit). They used it to cook on. They have very few possessions. Below the house they seemed to house the animals. Mostly cattle, chickens, sheep and goats. We saw them let the goats from this one house and there must have been 40 goats come out. Aaron and I could not believe how they just kept coming out.

The first night it is 8 o’clock, cold and dark and nothing to do so we might as jump into our sleeping bag. I have a thin self-inflating mattress and my -6C down filled sleeping bag. I jump in with my long johns, pants, 2 undershirts, shirt, soft shell and my -20C parka. I am fairly toasty. I don’t have a pillow so I take a stuff sack and fill it with spare cloths and puff it up, while I think I really invented something great, the actual use proves to be useless. Through the night, I am a little too warm so I take empty my stuff sack and stuff it with my parka. Now I have a feather pillow that is about 20% as nice as my nice home feathered pillow. I wake up every time I have to toss and turn. I look at the clock 12am, 1:30am, 2:30am. I am used to 6 hours of sleep. At home, I might get up for a half an hour and make a tea or something but here...all you can do is lay there and make yourself fall asleep again. And it is very cold. I actually wake up around 7am so I got 11 hours minus the time it took to get back to sleep.

Aaron didn’t fare so well. He went to bed at 8pm and slept till about 12:15. He woke up freezing, and got up feeling sick and was stumbling around in the dark looking for matches to light a candle. As he is tripping over things and knocking over the chairs, Hari wakes up and gives him his cell phone to use as a light. Aaron now discovers the matches and lights a candle. He can feel he has to take a dump and to take it quickly or else there might be a problem. He now takes the candle and goes outside to go to the outhouse squatty only to discover the door is locked. He then walks away from the outhouse, looking for an alternative but walked over the septic tank cover which was made of logs with a few logs missing. All of a sudden, one leg disappears in the night, and with the candle now flying in the air, he spreads eagle and stops himself so only one leg actually goes in the hole. His boot now sports some excrement and Aaron has not figured out at this point what has happened. So back to the building he goes. He wakes me up and asks me for my flashlight, he then quickly disappears to the newly discovered hole, hangs his butt over the side and feels much better 15 minutes later.

He is still freezing so he gets the woodstove going and manages to get a few hours sleep on and off between feeding the ferocious appetite of the stove. At about 3:30am, he runs out of wood and crawls back into his 0C sleeping bag and curls up into a ball. He slept for about 2 hours and woke up “so cold” to put it in his own words.

The next night I had the bright idea of filling our two steel water bottles with boiling hot water and putting some socks around and use it like a hot water bottle. Hari, who also froze with his thin sleeping bag, manages to score a thick blanket from Kuni and is able to put it over himself and Aaron. Aaron puts one bottle by his feet and the other by his torso. He slept very warm and had a great sleep other than he got sick again. At midnight he got up , went outside to the now unlocked squatty and purged from both ends. After 15 minutes, he felt okay again and continued his nice warm sleep.

The first morning we were awakened by the awesome sight of Lang Tang. We also had lots of curious children hanging around. After we had noodles for breakfast, we went out and took pictures of the children. They wanted to see the pictures and so Aaron gave them their own personal slide show from the back of his camera. They just loved it and couldn’t get enough of it. Aaron found it a very special time with the kids and it was one of his many highlights. He also had brought a bag of suckers and they were a hit amongst the children. Here are some photos of the kids.







Aaron and I had a break from 11am till 1pm lunch so we decided to climb up the mountain. It was quite a hike and the mountain top we were aiming for we ended up ditching for a higher peak behind it. Along the way we passed sheep and ruins of an old village long since abandoned. Reaching the top was awesome. On the way down, I went a little to fast and hard and started to form blisters. I realised how out of shape my feet were for downward decent. Going down a mountain is actually much harder and dangerous as going up. 80% of mountain climbing accidents happen on the way down. This little excursion was really worth it to me. I also realised my foolishness in not bringing my Tilley hat, sun screen, lip sun screen and water. In fairness, we were only heading for the little peek. This whole adventure is wising me up for Kilimanjaro.

The last group that came here was a medical team from Hawaii. So the people here associate us with doctors. It was cute; Aaron had a sick day in Kathmandu and one of the little girls said to Raju, “the little doctor is sick. (Aaron is the little doctor and I am the big doctor)” Thinking we are doctors, a man brings me his daughter with a major infection in her wrist. They said she fell in the snow. Her wrist is oozing puss and her hand is really swollen.

Before I left, there were two things I felt like I was to bring; a spare set of glasses and antibiotics. My glasses broke at the nose so I was glad I took some reading glasses. I went to the periodontist the day before I left for my trip and I had a bump on my gum. After he found out I was going to Nepal he gave me a prescription for antibiotics, just in case. I knew I had to fill that prescription.

After I prayed the little girl with the infection, I knew that I had to give her one of my antibiotic pills. So I got some water, gave her a pill and motioned her to swallow it. I instructed the father to make a poultice and put it on the wound to draw out the poison. I also asked him to bring her back that night. They never showed up that night so I asked Kunni about her. He told me that she went with her family, up in the mountains, that night, with the sheep and were not in the village. I was disappointed and I prayed for her. I asked Kunni if there was any way I could see her in the morning. He said he would send word to her father. When we were ready the next day, she did show up, by herself and I looked at her wrist. Her oozing stopped and her wound had closed. Her hand was still red but I could see that we gave the infection a major setback. I prayed for her again and gave her one more antibiotic pill. It felt good to be obedient to a prompting and I really believe that I made a major difference in her life.

We ended up going from house to house visiting and praying for them. Every house offers you “tea.” There version of tea is mostly milk with lots of sugar. I did notice one person breaking off a piece from a black substance that resembled anthracite coal. It tasted really nice as it was something warm. Every house had an open fire going and the smoke always blew Aaron’s way.

One place asked us to come and pray for their daughter City-mia (no clue how to spell it but that is what is sounded like.) Ctiy-mia was married and had four children and lived in another village but was so sick, that her father got her to nurse her back to health. When we got there, she was lying beside the fire and had been there for 15 days. She looked pretty sick and we prayed for her. At the end of the visit you could tell that she was much better. When we left the next day, we visited her once more on our way out and this time she was well enough to come and meet us outside. She sat down and we prayed for her once more.

We left Nessing and started our long hike to Dhunche. More about that in the next post.