WET UNDERWEAR, ROTTING RUBBISH AND LINEAR ACCELERATORS
It is monsoon in Nepal and much of the low lying terrain is flooded and roads impassable. Amongst others, the Kathmandu rubbish collectors are on strike and piles of rotting rubbish line the streets.
This morning, en route to the Bhaktapur Cancer Hospital, my bus came to a grinding halt as Maoist demonstrators abandoned their vehicles in the middle of the road. In torrential rain the local police made half hearted efforts to negotiate with the demonstrators. I decided to leg it to the Cancer Hospital.Walking. Towards me, wearing a huge affable smile and holding up a large black umbrella was an immaculately dressed Nepali businessman. As he passed by he rolled his head from side to side, Nepali style and nodded to the animated crowd and said “Democracy”. I laugh out loud but my humour is short-lived because my wet underpants are starting to complain and the torrential rain isn’t helping.
The reason I am wearing wet, apparently shrinking, underpants is because five day’s ago, I gave my $10 a night Hotel receptionist my dirty laundry and have not seen it since. In desperation last night, I washed a pair of my least organically challenged underpants using a bar of soap and a bottle of mineral water. I should explain that I did not employ the mineral water as a cleaning agent to prevent my underwear turning brown due to the galacticaly high ion content of the Kathmandu valley tap water but simply because like my laundry, water has been absent from my room for the past three days. My morning bathing routine involves five litres of mineral water and what I like to call, an origami Pilates routine which can only be technically executed by gritting the teeth and throwing five litres of mineral water at microbiologically challenged parts of ones body.
This morning my washed underpants had evidently achieved some sort of reverse osmosis being significantly wetter than when I rung them out the previous evening.This was not helpful but did explain the absence of my laundry.
An hour later, I arrived at the Bhaktapur Cancer Hospital to check up on the progress of the installation of a state of the art Linear Accelerator machine. No one has tried to install and commission a machine of this complexity in Nepal before and certainly not on a shoestring budget.The installation involves a technical collaboration between USA,Chinese, Nepalese and New Zealand technicians. To prevent the leakage of radioactivity, the walls of the facility have to be six feet thick and this has involved the largest single pour of concrete in Nepal.
If you peer through the smoke in the Linear Accelerator Vault where we are grinding out a channel for the machine wiring you can just see me. If I have a worried look on my face it’s not because this project is immensely challenging, it’s simply the underpants kicking in. Due to the rains the construction program is behind schedule. Sure this project is challenging but this is what Medicine Mondiale does. We change the world. Sometimes this is brick by brick and involves personal inconveniences like wet underpants and thick smoke, but check in three months from now and you will see a state of the art Linear Accelerator being operated and maintained by Nepali technicians and save thousands of lives
Mr Ray Inspects Linear Accelerator Vault
