The bus ride actually went well. I was so tired from not sleeping for days that I slept well with the rocking of the bus. It had little beds so that was fun. I had one scary moment when I woke up in the night to see that it was really dark, the narrow road was winding up the mountains, there was so much fog you could barely see anything AND the bus was flying! A little while later the bus ended up rear ending someone in a truck and that was interesting to watch. Both drivers flew out of their vehicles screaming at one another, then other people from vehicles stuck behind also joined the lively discussion, as did so e of the passengers on the bus. After about forty minutes of group yelling everyone got back into their vehicles and we were on our way.
I was met in Shangri La by one of the members of the team up here and taken to their rehab center. I spent the rest of the day with the team up here and then we headed off early the next morning.
The road trip was AMAZING! We were gone for about eight days and went to really remote places in the mountains. Let me set the scene for you.... Our little team consisted of myself (speech therapist), the group leader who is a German man wearing an Indiana Jones hat, one of the local staff members, a local physical therapist and a women from England who was wearing a cowboy hat.... All five of us came charging into these remote villages in a jeep. It must have been quite a scene! It was sort of like a Wild West experience... We would come bouncing into these, dusky, single road towns (these roads were so rocky that I hit my head off of the ceiling of the jeep a couple of times) and people would gather. Generally speaking we would get there and the person or couple of people that the gvt had sent for would be there. All of the commotion of us being in these towns that don't get any foreigners would result in the members of the small town gathering to watch, everything here is a group activity : ). As people got an understanding of why we were there, they talked amongst themselves and generally came up with more people that may benefit from speaking with us. It was great to see the community members thinking and advocating for each other!
This trip came about because the gvt was given a grant from a private donor to help families with people with Down Syndrome. They asked the organization that I am partnering with to come with them to help identify these individuals. This trip was a blessing because it allowed us to meet the gvt employees from the remote counties and it allowed us to meet these people with various special needs and medical conditions and give advise where we could and also tell them about our clinic and invite them to come for medical treatment and therapy. Also, this came at a great time because there is a team of specialist coming into Kunming this week to do surgeries for little cost. We were able to identify dome people who would benefit from this and they actually made it to Kunming in time and are receiving medical treatment as I type. HE is good!!! One of these patients is a little five year old girl that we met on our last day on the road.... She was burned on the back of her leg two years ago, the burn is behind her knee and is not healing causing her a lot of pain. One of the specialities of the team coming in is burn victims. This is an issue in rural areas because it is really cold and some of their houses are heated by open fires. Also there are a number of gas fires because gas stations are so
far away so people who have motorbikes keep gas cans in the house....open fires and gas cans are a
fatal mix. The people that we met, live up in the mountains and are farmers and herders...having an injury is devastating because manual labor us really the only option vocationally.
It's out of the scope of this post to go into all that we encountered but basically I would say that we spoke to about 120 people, some of them living in villages that were hours by car from the neighboring villages. We identified four or five individuals with Down Syndrome, a couple with Autism, many with developmental delays with unknown causes, some stroke patients, four people with mental health issues and about five people who are Deaf or hard of hearing. It was heart breaking to see mothers who brought their children down the mountain to meet us along the side of the road in hopes that we could give them a magic potion to heal their child's physical or cognitive disability. One mom carried a twelve year old girl on her back for two hours to meet us. I wish we could give more than is evenly humanly possible. It was also sad to hear that some of these kids stayed at home in a bed, by themselves while their family farmed....there are no schools that allow children with physical or cognitive disabilities to attend in this area. Many of the parents that we met had also been scammed
and taken for what little money that they had by people who told them that expensive surgeries or medicine could cure their child. These children had disabilities that are not curable but could become better managed with therapy. This trip certainly reminded me why I am here and although the homesickness has begun to set in a little, I know that I'm exactly where I should be.
P.S. On a less serious note, this trip required the eating of many things that I have never had before.... Intestine (I thought it was mushroom), internal organs of something, lung, a chicken head, yak butter tea and what put me over the edge..... Cow head soup. The soup had so much oil from the cows head that it would harden if you left it in your bowl. I kept trying to eat the various parts of the cows brain or whatever and pretend it was something else, unfortunately this dish is a delicacy so the people we were eating with reminded me what I was eating multiple times. It was rough!
PPS. On an even lighter note... I had a fat American/ Goldilocks experience. We were eating in the remotest place that we stayed. We were eating in this one room area by the light of a single light bulb and myself and a skinny Chinese man were sharing a bench. Out of nowhere the bench smashed! I have never seen anything like it! It wasn't like the leg broke or it cracked, it smashed into tiny pieces and it happened so fast that this man and I were both lying on the ground in shock....it was embarrassing but hysterical too!!!
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