First Month Done

Friday April 1, 2011

4:23PM

After the adventure earlier this week, there hasn’t been much exciting to report. The HRA Basecamp team, led by Luanne Freer, has been in town for the last 2 days and it has been nice to have some new faces with whom to socialize. Luanne has been running the basecamp operation for the past 7 or 8 years since she first worked in Pheriche back in 2002. This year there will be 3 doctors there as well, excluding herself, but she plans on staying only long enough to get things up and running smoothly. I’ll be trading for a couple of weeks with the Nepali doctor and suspect that Alun and Lauren will also go up for a few days of something different.

Two nights ago the two teams and the duo of Sandy Scott and John Knowles from the Everest Memorial Trust sat down to a tasty dinner and a few drinks at the Himalayan Lodge. It’s amazing how well one sleeps after 1 glass of red wine - far and away my best night yet. I think I could make it a nightly habit, but red wine, even the cheap stuff, runs about $35 per bottle. 

John and Sandy have an interesting relationship with the HRA. The HRA has been running this facility since 1973, but sometime in the ‘80’s the EMT began remodeling the post. This has lead to the EMT managing the post from a structural standpoint and the HRA handling the administrative and medical side. I understand that, occasionally, there may be some tension between the two groups on how things should be done, but from my observation it appears that everyone gets along pretty well. Through the years the EMT has installed the running water, solar power, and a glycol heating system, all of which I’m more than happy to use. However, Nepal can be a difficult place for advanced technology to take hold and the heating system has never really worked. It would be nice to be warm at some point during the day, especially inside, but I suppose I can be content with the occasional hot shower. 

That brings up the downside of the last 48 hours. The day Sandy and John left, and the day the plumber was supposed to arrive to fix the pipes, the hot water pump mysteriously quit. Once that news got around to everyone, spirits dipped slightly, to say the least. It didn’t help that the plumber, who was supposed to bring 15 ft of replacement pipe, arrived with 12 in of pipe, no tools, and after taking one look at the system stated that he really didn’t think he could do much. Awesome!

I’m certainly no plumber but it made sense to take a systematic approach to figuring out the issue rather than giving up on account of overall complexity. Coincidentally, or perhaps through some divine intervention, Alun and I both had dreams during the night about fixing the system. Over breakfast this morning we put our heads together and started at the breaker box moving down the line toward the pump. Ultimately, the problem was lack of power to the pump which was easily remedied by splicing a broken wire back into the circuit. Voila! The hot shower was back up and running and spirits recharged. Now the plumber could go back to eating and watching Forest Gump.

Since we now had water again, it was time to get out and work up a little sweat. I put off running yesterday in hopes of getting the water fixed, so I set out on the route I had planned previously. Thinking back to my previous running experiences here, I started out downhill for a few minutes in hopes of getting the system a little warm before trashing myself up a hill. That almost worked, but the hill started a little before I was ideally warm. To be honest, I’m not sure that being ideally warm would have made much of a difference in my ability to get up and over Pheriche Pass. Surprisingly, I managed to get within about 20 ft of the top before I started to get lightheaded from the effort. After coming down the opposite side of the pass I took a hard left at the junction with the trail to Dingboche. There were a few steep sections leading up to the neighboring village that I had to walk and then a couple more when crossing up and over the ridge from Dingboche back to Pheriche. All in all, I had to walk less than I realistically expected but more than I hoped. I guess it really wasn’t bad for 50 minutes and close to 1000 ft of elevation gain. If I manage to run the whole thing before I leave, I’ll be pretty psyched. Of course no recent venture would be complete without running into my Parisian friend, Christine, who made it to Basecamp and was returning down the ridge from Dingboche.

Upon getting back to the post I kicked the plumber out of the bathroom (He had decided to do some work) and took advantage of our efforts from this morning. Since my I had been wearing my last clean shirt and socks for the last 3 days, I also took the opportunity to do some laundry, which reminds me of a question I have been pondering for the past few days. When washing  clothes by hand in a basin of soapy water, do the clothes really get much cleaner, or is the dirt just redistributed? I’m leaning toward the latter. Perhaps the icy, subfreezing fog in which the clothes are now hanging to “dry” will contribute positively to the cleaning effect.

On a final note for the day, if you’re reading this Friday morning in Portland, don’t wimp out because of the forecasted weather. Go to the Boys and Girls Clubs Auction tonight! Anything on which Charlotte works this hard is guaranteed to be good and you can go home with a warm fuzzy feeling inside for supporting a great local organization. Happy April Fools Day!