I've been home for two weeks but I'm still not quite right in the belly. The Flagyl 400mg tabs are working, but that Chipotle I downed an hour ago feels like a sucker punch. And its not just the gut. My mind isn't the same either. Re-entry is always a bit tough for me. This was not a vacation. I saw and experienced much and have a lot to unpack mentally. The sights and smells and sounds and faces of a country in struggle are still with me when I lay still at night.
When I close my eyes...This is what I see.


This trip report will be a bit of a way for me to decompress. To sift through some of the "why's" and "what next's." Bear with me if some of my worldview finds its way into this little story. You may or may not agree with my take on the world, but perhaps you can find some joy in the faces and places of this mysterious and inspiring land. So here goes. To Nepal and back again. And there and back again in a seven month period. We have been to Nepal twice in the past several months. This trip report will combine the experiences and images of those two trips. They are a blur in my mind so I'll just condense them here for simplicity.

June 2009 and January 2010:
The plan is pretty basic. No climbing. Go and spend time with local Nepali church planters and help mobilize, educate villagers and assist them in the work they do there. Do some medical treatment/dentistry/physical therapy in under-served, impoverished villages who have little o no access to health care. Leave America at home. Be available in mind and body and spirit. Open our eyes. Love the people. Help how we can.

Day1. San Fran to Bangkok to Kathmandu
We land hard and Kathmandu hits us in the face. Loud. Busy. Full on third world. Filthy. We check into the Tibet Guest House. No power. We find our way down the hall and I catch a glimpse of something familiar on a window. Nice. Climbers lurk here.

The first couple days are spent in tourism mode. We spend time at the Hindu and Buddhist temples. These places are a pretty big deal to these two religions. Its not every day you see open streetside cremations. Here are some images from those first few days.
The smells of incense mingle with those of open sewage, massive piles of trash and the pungent urban odor of a typical third world city. I have been to Europe and Russia and once spent a month in Kazakhstan. Kathmandu is intense and I'm soon ready to get out of the city. The next few days will be spent doing improvised medical camps in outlying villages. We have brought enough local anesthetic and gauze to pull a lot of teeth. Adam, my climbing partner is a Physical Therapist. My surgical assistant from home has come to assist me. My wife and two kids will round out the american part of our team.

Hours and hours and hours we grind Northeast on unimproved roads where death from approaching TATA awaits around every corner.
I always fantasized about these bus journeys as a kid reading Bonnington, Boardman and Tasker. Now I just want to vomit. Or get out or both.

We will be spending time in Dunuwar villages. The lowest of the low caste people. "the untouchables." They are viewed as lowest of the low.
We spend a day visiting some smallish villages where there, at this point, are no christian churches. The sadness and poverty are overwhelming. Disease is everywhere. There is a sense of hopelessness that is pervasive. The people are very friendly but....hurting. We are not on the tourist treks. We are not in places that get postcards made of them. Most of these people have never seen Americans. This isn't "in the brochure"




We arrive at our first village, a small, hillside hovel on the border of Tibet, and are greeted by the local Christian pastor. Happy dude. His joy is real. In fact, whether you belive me or not, my experience during these two trips, in the villages we spent time in, was that where there was christianity, there was real, palpable, inspiring joy. Where there once was uncertainty, hopelessness and helplessness.
Here is the pastor and a few "church" members.
"Shoes off in church please."

We spend most of our days doing medical camps. Adam does PT on old, hobbled backs, knees and feet. I pull lots and lots and lots of teeth. I do some minor surgery but try to keep things simple with goats bleating five feet away and flies landing on he bloody instruments in my hands. It is an amazing experience and people line up in droves. We are primarily treating Hindus and our job is not to "preach at 'em" or evangelize in any way. We are simply here to help and show them that somebody cares about them. Something that just does not happen in this society if you are born in the wrong place with he wrong name. The caste system is still in full swing here. They are amazed that we have come this far to care for them, engage in conversation, eat with them and show them that they are more than their caste says they are. It blows their mind that somebody loves them.

After a couple days. Our hosts want to take us to a nice hotel where we can watch a sunrise over the Himalaya....."Scott, you will have many nice view because you are the climber!"
We have been eating village food and the sound of a nice hotel, though a good bit of a drive away, is welcoming. Here are some shots of eating in the villages. They cook in stone huts, straight out of the dark ages. Mainly potatoes, cauliflower and bony chicken knuckle bits with dhal. Tasty but suspect. Sus---pect.
Out of the six of us, four of us, including my eleven year old daughter, get violently ill during the trip. Massive bouts of vomiting and the big "D" for a few days that really depleted us physically. Throwing up, through the night, into dry heaves beyond your abdominal strength, in a third world country is not as romantic as it might sound. It is an experience none of us will soon forget. Ouch with a capital "ow."
Ok....back to the hotel. We drive out of Kathmandu.......this......
And in two hours....are met with.........This!
"whoah...." After days of living in the dark ages, we almost cannot wrap our minds around the view before us. It is amazing. Truly splendid. Luxurious. We spend a cushy night in a nice bed, the scramble up to the rooftop at dark thirty am for a sunrise I will never forget. The entire Himalaya, from Dorje Lakpa to Everest to Kangch to Makalu, wakes out of the darkness before us in pristine detail. I feel like Shipton. I cannot click the shutter fast enough. Then I sit and stare and nobody talks....then back behind the lense for more. It seems to go on for hours....It is truly the sunrise of a lifetime. Enjoy it with me here.

I feel utterly spent after the sunrise sesh and I spend the day doing pen and ink drawings in my journal, thinking about the poor, the needy, the orphans of the world. And how it clashes with all that I see and tend to get wrapped up in back home. The materialism, the greed, the selfishness, the me..me...me society in America. The I'm right, you're wrong. The "I better gits mine." The "its all the government's fault." The "Its somebody elses fault." The I want more, I'm entitled, I've been wronged, I'm angy....I, I, I,I. Where is the..."how are you?" "You look like you need a minute to talk, man," "You ok maam?," "here, you take mine...I've got a few minutes to spare."? I love America. Best place to be if you ask me. But man, it is the center if the "I and Me and Mine" universe. These past trips, and the one to Kazakhstan before it, have shown me that If I'm not careful, it becomes all bout me real quickly.
That is not the man I want to be.
Down the hill we go. Back into the muck and the smog and the mire. Back to the city.
We re-organize and have a few more great days of medical clinic. I pull a whole bunch more teeth, including a surgical extraction of an impacted wisdom tooth on a Tibetan woman who had walked for thirty daysto Kathmandu after her "whole village died." She wasn't sure why she came, but just started walking, hoping to perhaps end up at the Buddist temple Swayambhunath. Instead, she walks by out outdoor clinic, sees the sign for "free medical" and stops by and waits for an hour until I am all done with the last patient. She looks like something straight out of Rowell's "Throne Room of the Mountain Gods." She leaves with a smile on her face and so do I. What an encounter.
So now I'm back. My mind seems swollen with all I have seen. In two trips we have seen the gamut of humanity. Seen maoist rebel riots in progress, survived a stuck van in a torrential flash flood, shown our children the reality of life on earth for most of mankind, seen sunsets and sunrises and made friendships that will remain in our hearts forever. I was honored to go and serve such a humble and sincere people. In the faces of Nepal I saw sadness and sorrow and hunger and pain and joy and color and sunlight and hope. I learned a greater sense of humility and a deepening of purpose in my own life. I believe God is slowly and surely redeeming the human race and using all kinds of people in all corners of the globe to do so. My hope is that my children saw the goodness that is out there and needs to be seen and felt and shared. My hope is that they develop a broken heart for the worlds poor. I'm a young dude, a climber, a dad, a husband, a leader, a follower. But trips like this age you a bit. I'm fortunate to go and see and do in some pretty amazing places. Just getting the inertia going to take some time off work, to raise some funds, to mobilize and get off the couch is a hard thing. But once you are on that plane, wheels up, with the adventure before you, you know its all worth it. There is so much need out there.
So here are a few parting shots. Some of my most vivid memories. They are not necessarily of mountains, though one of the Big E is in there. May they inspire you to get off the couch. May they perhaps nudge you to, for a moment, take care of your fellow man rather than whine about how bad you have it. The trick I've found, is to somehow sustain what I have seen and felt. Because all too soon I find myself back home, impatient in the line at Starbucks complaining that they better not make my cappuccino too hot again this time. It's images like this that I need to more often replay so that I might learn from them what life should really be more about.
See you around.
Micronut.