Dear my seven or eight readers –

I made two new year’s resolutions around my blog. First, that I would write more frequently and try to include photos. The second point was that I would try to focus my writing more on our work and to also mention what kind of silly adventures my Marmot gear ends up in as I stomp around the hinterlands of Nepal. I have been admittedly lax on both points, as I feel one should be with resolutions.

Since the beginning of time, it seems, one of the main forms of political protest in Nepal has been the general strike or, in Nepali, the bandh. These bandhs occur with varying frequency depending upon the immediate political atmosphere, but tend to average around one per month. During times of turmoil this number grows significantly, often reaching one each week or more.

A friend just brought a steaming thermos of salt and butter tea into the office, and the greasy brew warms me a bit as it goes down. But the tea is quickly cold in the frigid office. It’s noon and I haven’t removed my down jacket today, and nor do I expect to.

It’s not that Kathmandu is all that cold, it’s a balmy 43 degrees outside right now and this is about as cold as it ever gets here. But, the complete lack of indoor heat seems to drop the temperature another ten degrees at least.

It’s the holiday season and I find myself, yet again, vowing to be a more regular contributor to my blog in the coming year. It’s not that the outcry from my seven readers has been terribly deafening, but rather that sitting down to write is a very cathartic and healthy thing for me.

There is a strange sense of order in the domestic terminal of the Kathmandu airport -- some common logic among the whirlpool of people and goods that constantly shuffle across the open and dirty warehouse. There are untold numbers of young Nepalis in western dress, raisin-faced old women laden with gold earrings and elaborate saris, and always a few of foreigners usually looking a bit bewildered. The airport possesses a kind of beauty that somehow, indescribably, makes sense. But this is lost to the untrained Western eye.

I still don’t understand the appendix, even though I’ve had the privilege of looking at mine – all pink and red and limp in a glass vial - while recovering from the surgery in a Kathmandu hospital. It seems to me to be like a roulette wheel, or some organ of chance whose function is simply to cause some of us sudden and intense pain in the lower right-hand quadrant of the abdomen, followed closely by a trip to the hospital and hopefully, speedy removal.

It’s been a while and a pile of frequent flyer miles since typhoid. I’m back Stateside for the summer and, finally, feel strong again. It’s been good to be here, to feel the grass beneath my toes, to take a few moments and try to put all of the contradictions aside and focus upon the sun sliding down behind the maple trees.

All of the immediate goodness of America, infinite like yellow lines on the interstate. I’m always amazed at how our culture can encompass so many things that are simultaneously so arbitrary, yet so essential.

Working abroad isn’t always easy on the stomach and after ten relatively sickness-free years in Nepal, I developed a good and robust case of typhoid fever. I was trapped in the throes of a high fever, headache, and stomach cramps that kept me delirious and in bed for over a week, and will take weeks or even months more to fully recover.

The southern belt of Nepal – the Terai – has been closed for a week now by a political group advocating for the rights of ‘Madeshis’ or Nepalis that live along the Indian border and who often have closer cultural and social ties to India than to the middle-hill dominated political scene in Kathmandu. The Madeshis have stopped all motorized transportation along the major highways in the Southern third of the country, effectively sealing off the entire country from any goods and stranding thousands of people.

This morning, the United Marxist-Leninist political party - one of the four leading political parties in Nepal -threatened to pull out of the government in reaction to the death of a young member of the party’s youth wing, the curiously named ‘Youth Force.’ The young man was allegedly shot by members of the ruling Maoist party’s youth wing, the ‘Young Communist League’ in the far western district of Rupandehi.