A Poem About A Trip To The Cinema

We're all going to see Ice Age 3,
ramro cha will it be Nepali?
Will the polar bears eat daal bhaat?
Will the mammoth wear a topi hat?

Prize goes to Ang didi
picks the only taxi new to the city,
cut throat driving like mario carts
continuous horn engine stop then start

Shiny cinema looms up from the dust
showing bollywood films of love and lust.
How many bricks on how many backs
must have been carried to make that?

Step out of the hot colourful air
into a much more sterile affair
food in packets, drinks in cartons,
no banter, no barter, all a bit spartan

Seats with leg room far in excess
of even the longest Nepali legs at full stretch.
The film begins and noise levels rise
not like in England where we all become mice

The sloth squeals and the weasel wheedles
the squirrels quarrel and the sabre tooth tangles.
Adults fall silent, children ask questions
will the mammoths succeed in their mission?

I don't really care, but I glance down the row,
see eyes wide and faces aglow
with excitement and anticipation
with ears pricked for new information

It feels good this cinema trip
I need to stop giggling and just get a grip.
Then it ends with happiness all round,
with a hero and a villian to please the crowd

who leap to their feet in a rush for the stairs
who are stopped in their tracks by the blinding glare
of the hot Kathmandu sun, beating down,
like the end of hibernation, full of new sights and sound

I drink my fill of dust and mango, of stupa and cycle,
talking mammoths are nothing, this is the miracle,
this wonderful city, such chaos and contradiction,
old next to new with suprising tolerance not friction

A Most Accidental Injury

The lunchtime presentations also known as opportunities for tea, a chair and a fan, happen in an impossibly small and stuffy room on the top floor. Me and Lou did a presentation on non-accidental injury on tuesday; in striking contrast to England in the aftermath of baby P this subject is rarely covered here and most of the junior doctors were unfamiliar with the term. Whether it doesn't happen as much, whether it is not reported as much, whether it is tolerated more, I'm not sure, but definitely in terms of incidence it pales in comparison to accidental injury. Accidents happen all the time here, among children and adults.

So when on the tuesday evening a call came to go to A&E to clerk an 11 year old boy who'd been electrocuted there was a collective sinking of hearts and steeling of nerves. Only two days before we'd seen the terribly blistered and burned lips and mouth of a two year old who'd eaten caustic soda, so there was a group sigh when we found the boy alert and sitting up, with not even a glimmer of a hair standing on end.

As the history unravelled, I thought I must have misunderstood; I double checked with the doctor and tried not to giggle: a history of a most accidental injury. The boy had stuck his head in the freezer and started licking the walls, a fault in the wiring gave him an electric shock and he had to be pull out by his brother. He'd somehow come away pretty much unscathed, except for having a very fat tongue, which meant he had to spend the next day on the ward looking sheepish and dribbling.

I learnt that licking the inside of the freezer isn't safe, that having a fat tongue makes you dribble and that it's nice to occasionally have a case you want to laugh about instead of cry.

UhOh Albino

Had a bit of a foot in mouth moment the other day; we were on our way to NICU when I suddenly caught sight of a distinctly english looking man lying in one of the surgical wards. This was a bit puzzling, because if you had the choice, you wouldn't choose to have an operation at this hospital (although the standard of care is a lot higher here in Kathmandu than in the rest of Nepal). I thought maybe he might need rescuing, and had ended up here by accident. Anyway we went to say hi and see if there was anything we could do, only trouble was he didn't speak any english. There followed a slow motion moment of realisation, as he tiredly turned to his friend, with an air of resignation as though this definitely wasn't the first time this had happened, then turned back to me and said 'I Nepali'.

I did try and style the whole thing out, asking him then in Nepali how he was, trying to insinuate I'd known all along, but he definitely wasn't fooled, and neither were the rest of the patients on the ward, or the nurses or the doctors. So I aborted that rescue mission and went back to playing with kids, which is a lot less likely to end up in a pickle. But what do you do when you mistake an albino Nepali for a stranded englishman? I'm really not sure, I hadn't really thought about it, sounds like the beginnings of a good joke though.