Ash and Small Bear go on an adventure!

First things first. Noah reminded me that I haven’t given my new traveling companion proper credit – Small Bear had other engagements this week, so I’m adventuring these days with Octagon the squid. He’ll make it into a photo somewhere, but until then you should know that he is small, and blue, and very cuddly – I think it’s all the arms.

It’s the season of mud and green, just now. The air is thick enough to have its own color and texture, unbearably sticky until at once, unpredictably, the clouds and the trees and the buildings all condense, and instead of moving slowly through a fog you swim your way home through sheets of water, the smell of incense and garbage crushed into the ground by the sky until everything is clean except your feet in their sandals in the river of the streets. It happened like this when I was a half-hour walk away from the clinic last week, and after a few seconds it looked like I’d stepped into the shower without taking off my clothes – customarily late for dinner, I didn’t have time to hide under any of the offered awnings, so I kept stomping away and laughing (with miles of umbrella-sheltered Nepalis staring and laughing at me, including five men hiding under one popcorn cart in the mud who kept inviting me to hide under it with them) until I made it safely back and could wring myself out.

The clinic is as painful and fascinating as before – we diagnosed a new case of leprosy yesterday, and I spent the morning reading about a disease that no one in the states really ever sees. In the afternoon, some of the girls in wheelchairs wanted us to take them to the Pashupati temple, so we pushed them uphill and then let them drag us down, until at the temple door a guard stopped us and pointed to the sign saying “entrance for Hindus only”.  We asked if we could take them just to the inner door, so they could see, and he said no. We asked if HE could push them into the inner door, so they could see, and he said no. We said ‘They are Hindu and they want to go into their temple!’ and he said no, and told us to leave. So we left, and were angry at how unfair it is, but the girls just said ‘this is the way it goes’. So it goes here, beautiful and strange and unfair, full of smiling children and hissing monkeys and leering old men, and tea. Lots of tea.