Hello all,

Ian - “So what do you have to do now?”
Ryan - “Ummm…nothing.”
Ian - “Whoa. It’s weird to hear you say that.”

For six months I have been in the rain, the mold, the clouds, the mists, the decay and the downpours. Earlier this week cool dry wind flooded down from the Tibetan plateau. There was an intense thunderstorm in the night and a brilliant blue sky in the morning. Surely the earth would drown in a sky that deep and blue. Cornfields turned brown in the matter of a few days. Months of neglected laundry was done. Mold started to dry and blow out of the cabin. The sun was hot and I felt happy.

Continue reading Bright Sunshiny Day

It was Sunday, and this was my advice to the family.  “To recover, he has to be taken to Calcutta or Delhi and the costs would be hundreds of thousands of rupees.  You have already bankrupted yourselves, and his fragile body couldn’t stand the trip.  He will die without surgery, and there is no hope of that.  I will continue to give injections to keep it from spreading, but you have 2 options.  First, continue spoon feeding him liquids and he will live a little longer… but his severe pain will also last longer.  Second, stop spoon feeding him any liquids.  He will die of dehydration sooner and will experience less pain.”
Even though he was in a coma, he was fully aware of pain.  The family chose to keep him alive as long long as possible.  Over the multiple weeks of caring for Karna Bahadur Rai I heard many fragments of his story.  They were whispered to me over cooking fires, recalled in low voices under a shared umbrella or spoken loudly and angrily for all to hear.   This is the closest thing to an obituary he will ever have.
Continue reading Proud Flesh