We are staying at a small guesthouse associated with a Buddhist Monastery it’s about a 10-minute walk from the clinic and from one of world’s largest  Stupas.  Bodhnath stupa is a Buddhist shrine that attracts hundreds of people every day to circumambulate the stupa, spin prayer wheels and meditate. It’s a ritual that combines religious observance with a social event. There are many monks and nuns dressed in colorful red robes.

 

 Our guesthouse has a beautiful garden with a vegetarian  restaurant (the food is quite good). Our room is about 10 feet by 12 feet with a double bed (the mattress is little more than a mat) and a small closet. The bathroom is about 4 by 5 with the shower situated so that the whole room gets wet when you take a shower (no curtain); we lost the toilet paper the first time I took a shower. The power is only on 12 hours a day, in 4 hour stints, on a rotating basis and some businesses have generators they use sparingly, so we’re never really sure when or where we’ll have power. Nepal is in a serious drought (no rain since October) so public water is only available three days a week. Everyone stores water in underground tanks and then pumps it to the top of the building to let gravity provide water pressure. Water has not been a problem for us, except of course that can only drink bottled water.

 

The clinic is set up at a local school, some of the students are full time boarders, some are day timers (they come in the morning for breakfast and stay until after dinner only sleeping at home) and some are more traditional students only attending from morning until late afternoon. We have seen students from other nearby schools as well.   One is called Child Haven and I believe it’s an orphanage.  We also saw children from a government school. All the schools accept students from all over Nepal which  is a very small country only about 150 mile north to south and 300 miles east to west. Most of the children that are boarders are there because they have no parents or no school in their area. The children are mostly from 5 to 15 years old.