Flipping through the pages of a popular Nepali daily, a name leaped out at me. That of Peter Galpin’s. By the time I was done reading the piece about him, I was happy. Not because I happened to know Peter and therefore had this feeling of oh-I-know-lot-more-than-what-is-written-here, but purely because getting to know people like Peter has been a big privilege in my life. Peter is one of the most popular plastic surgeons in Hawaii, who incidentally is a paraplegic.
You must be wondering why I mention this person! To cut a long story short, the first time I met him was at TIA approximately three years ago. He was in Nepal as a member of a surgical mission organized by a Nepali citizen practicing medicine in Hawaii with help from an American Surgeon, Bradley Wong, MD. I still remember meeting Brad, a white haired, Chinese looking, no-nonsense gentleman at what I was told was the only Nepali restaurant in Hawaii. That was about four years ago.
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Over a plate of momo, Brad shared his insights on life. “You leave no stone unturned to make money for the most part of your life, and at a certain point your inner voice tells you to stop. Then it’s payback time” said Brad. From that point on, he decided to dedicate ten years of his life to serving the poor. He talked about how he had been conducting free surgical camps in Philippines for the last seven years.
Towards the end, I just could not help asking him if he would be interested in doing something similar in Nepal. It didn’t take him too long to decide. “If two guys are ready, I can certainly come” said he. “Sure!” we replied in unison.
After months of planning, the final few days before Brad’s arrival were quite stressful. Brad constantly wanted to know if we had done all the necessary planning from our end: how his team would be travelling to Dhankuta, where they would be staying, and where Peter would be staying. The pressure kept mounting to a point where opening my inbox made me nervous.
Frequent trips were made to the town of Dhankuta. Dhakuta was a nice town—o n a hill with a magnificent view and even more magnificent climate. A tour of the hospital, the place where the surgeries and post-op care were to take place, took me by surprise as I hadn’t imagined a district hospital to be so well equipped. The only problem was that brand new medical equipment with labels saying ‘Gifted from’ followed by all the well-known INGOs you could possibly think of, lay unused on the top floor of the hospital.
The room had a signboard that read ‘Store’, but I felt the urge to rename it ‘permanent storage room’ instead. One particular conversation I had with the chief administrator of the hospital still lingers in my mind. When I asked him why they weren’t making use of all those sophisticated medical equipment, his answer was completely unapologetic. “These donors just give us these machines and leave. Shouldn’t they provide at least a little financial help so that we could pay for the electricity and maintenance?”
Maybe this is a lesson for the well-wishers of this wonderful country who want to help us by building roads, schools, hospitals and even installing traffic lights! The question we would like to ask them is: how can you just build a hospital and leave? How are we going to run it once you are gone? We need everything!
Months passed and the team of almost a dozen specialized doctors and nurses arrived in Dhankuta. In spite of the fact that the patients were already pre-screened and short-listed for surgery by local Nepali doctors, the crowd outside the hospital was unbelievable. Quite surprisingly, even the people who required no surgery kept insisting that the volunteers provide them at least an opportunity to talk to American doctors. Maybe they had heard of our own political bigwigs visiting hospitals abroad, which was the reason for their conviction in the ineptitude of Nepali doctors!
The free surgical camp ran for nine days, with approximately 400 patients operated. That was when I realized the severity of the problems of uterus prolapse and hernia in the people of that region. Every other middle aged man was a hernia patient, and 90 percent of women who made it to this unique surgical camp wanted to get rid of their uterus. BPKIHS in Dharan, one of the best medical facilities that Nepal boasts of, is just 30 kilometers downhill, and yet no one seemed to have enough money to make the for an operation. The fact that they opted to wait for a mission of this kind clearly suggests that they would rather continue to live in pain and discomfort.
This was back in 2010. Subsequently, the team came back in 2011, and this time the number of patients was even higher. Most recently, the team just returned to US after conducting a similar camp in the district hospital of Lahan. Initially I had had my misgivings regarding the venue, simply because I thought that Lahan was more accessible and developed compared to many other places of Nepal. For obvious reasons, I had always believed Tarai to have higher living standards compared to the rest of Nepal. I was completely wrong. Even if it was in Tarai, the hospital barely had anything in order, patients lay on makeshift tables with bottles of saline water tied to window grills. The hospital stank worse than the gutters on either side of the highway, and patients walked barefoot wrapped in a torn dhoti or lungi.
After my experience of these three camps, one thing became perfectly clear to me: anywhere you go in Nepal, it’s invariably only a handful that are rich. The rest, as mentioned, live their entire lives embracing poverty as a ‘gift-of-god’. Ironically, nothing seems to have changed at the bottom of the pyramid even after a series of revolutions ’for the people’.
As for Peter, he keeps telling me how enriching the whole experience has been, and how much he looks forward to coming next year. Yes, we need his free service.
hiteshkarki@gmail.com
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