December 25, 2017 – Merry Christmas
After multiple very long plane rides, about 20 movies between the three of us and a night ride through Doha, Qatar, Robert Sydney and I have arrived in Kathmandu, Nepal. We are staying in a lovely homestay and since we all hadn’t had a real meal in a few days our host mom made us all huge plates of “daal bhat” which is rice, vegetables and some lentil soup. It was delicious!! All three of us had huge helpings and then promptly fell into food comas and went straight to sleep.
After a short coffee and cookie break we are now talking with Bhupal, our amazing mentor from the International NGO that we work with in Nepal called NCDC, (Namsaling Community Development Center) and making a plan for our time in Kathmandu. We are setting up meetings with different organizations in Nepal that are doing similar projects to the ones that we are assessing for on this trip.
December 26, 2017
Today we spent some time walking through the city of Kathmandu. The air is super dusty but the city is full of color and the people are very kind. We met Kaji, another NCDC employee at the NCDC office and had some delicious chai tea while talking about our plans for this trip. While we were there Sydney and I told Bhupal that we wanted to buy traditional female outfits called “kurta-suruwal”. A woman from NCDC joined us to a tailoring shop that sold custom “kurta-suruwal”. The shop was amazing, so full of color. I choose a dark blue top and pink pants while Sydney picked out a combo of green, purple, pink and red. We both decided that we wanted some sort of pink or red in our outfits because those colors are the most common to see on women actually wearing them. We had a wonderful day exploring Kathmandu and tomorrow we will start our meetings.
December 29, 2017
Dr. B arrived today! We spent the morning exploring Thamel, the tourist market in Kathmandu. Afterwards we went to the Park Hill Hotel to meet Dr. B and we had afternoon cappuccinos with Dr. B, Homnath, his son and his grandson. Homnath worked with Dr. Barry to found NCDC, and acted as the first CEO. We showed them the work that we have been doing with drones and talked about our plans for MHM (Menstrual Hygiene Management) in Kalinchok.
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