I’m getting out of chronological order here, and will post about my Dashain holiday soon. But I wanted to tell you all about my second field trip whilst it was still fresh in my mind…
My second work trip was a Project Monitoring and Evaluation trip to Aghor, where previous EWB vollie Kat had worked on developing a WSP. It’s in the hilly region, so I was a bit nervous following my experience in Gorkha!
But wow, how different this trip was. We left Bharatpur late Wednesday arvo, and stayed overnight in Hetauda. This involved staying in a motel where I had my own room, Western toilet, and TV (alas, no hot shower). I even had both dinner and breakfast brought to my room. Now this was the kind of fieldwork I could get on board with!
Thursday morning we drove up to Aghor (about 90 minutes), and I was yet again struck by how beautiful Nepal is- even though I was of course terrified by the crazy Nepali driving and winding roads along cliff faces. But, to my great joy, there was bitumen road all the way up to, and through, Aghor!! None of this changing into various vehicles to combat mud, boulders and rivers, followed by 2 hours scaling a cliff face- Krishna pulled up to a house in Aghor where we jumped out and were served tea. Mmmmm.
I felt the day was going pretty well; I was asking intelligent questions and using my dodgy Nepali skills to communicate. We started our site assessment on flat terrain, and visited the school tap, where this cutie was super keen to pose for a photo.
When it came time to head up to one of the tanks (on a hill) we jumped in the Land Rover and drove as close as we could- again, heavenly by comparison to Gorkha! I was also enjoying the day and appreciating the village, probably because I was clean, energetic, and still had the same amount of self esteem that I had woken up with that morning! We climbed up to the tank (less than 5 minutes) and I was bounding along happily climbing the dry rocks. On the way back down, Kumar insisted that I use a stick (I had left my personal stick in Bharatpur), having heard about my adventures in Gorkha. Unfortunately my reputation as a klutz had preceded me…
On our way down from the second tank I was again happy as larry, stoked that I understood the technical aspects of the reservoir and distribution system that we’d just investigated, when I rolled my ankle, stacked it, and hit my head on the way down. Amazingly, once I had sat back up I realized that although I had taken a lot of skin off of my right arm and leg, my ankle was fine and my head didn’t hurt. However, the colleagues I was with had seen my spectacular fall and fussed over me as I tried to get up and walk the rest of the way.
Kumar called someone in the village to bring a heap of band aids up to us, and we hobbled over to the nearest house for the guys to fix me up. Alas, their medical skills weren’t exactly down with it, and I ended up with a row of band aids all stuck across the skinless area (they were more concerned with stopping the bleeding areas than the overall injury). So as you can imagine, when I fixed the dressings myself that evening it wasn’t great fun pulling the band aids off of the freshly skinned area! Just to add to the embarassment, I had torn my only pair of long pants minutes before leaving for the field trip (my other pair was killed on my first field trip) so I had to quickly change to 3/4 pants. Which meant I hadn't shaved my legs. So I was particularly stoked about having a guy my age cleaning up my prickly leg!
Sheepishly I finished the inspection of the last tap, and we headed back towards the main village. My embarrassment increased when Kumar pointed out that Kat hadn’t had any troubles hiking around this area, so he was surprised at me. Significant self esteem drop of the day. Made worse when we got to Krishna, our driver, who asked what had happened, and was treated to a re-enactment by Kumar which involved me tripping over, throwing my hands up in the air and landing flat on my back.
Needless to say, if anyone feels like sending me a birthday present, what I really need is a replenished supply of antiseptics and wound dressings.
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