Getting Settled

So far today one of my biggest challenges has been sleep. I got up early this morning, ate a Nepalese breakfast made by Sereta, discovered that nothing was open until a few hours later anyway, and proceeded to sleep. Right now it's very late here, so I'm sure I should be sleeping, but unfortunately I'm still quasi-running on Eastern.

Bernie

I met my contact from Liverpool, England this evening and we had a nice chat over dinner. This is either his second or third trip to Nepal and I learned more from him about Nepal in two hours than from any Wikipedia article.

He told me about some of the more instrumental groups & individuals doing relief and recovery work here. As luck would have it, there have been extremely innovative things happening here in terms of trying to reduce, reuse, & recycle because it is so much more cost-effective and has resulted in lots of attention from the scientific community. There is movement in trying to set up some solar powered infrastructure here, which is one thing. Another interesting development on the healthcare side is using some type of worm to compost biohazardous materials-- more specifically used dressings.
Now of course being the disaster nerd I am, I'm going to read more on this because I'm so curious, but beyond that there is one more thing Bernie told me that made me ecstatic: The individual who has been very influential in this innovative movement is actually a Civil Engineer who is an emergency manager that was in Papua New Guinea giving a lecture on earthquake readiness/response when the initial earthquake happened. (I thought I had struck gold.) It was at this point I knew: He and I need to meet. So, after speaking with Bernie, I may be able to make that connection later on in my trip.

Tomorrow

I'm unsure of tomorrow's plans. I'm supposed to be either heading with Bernie to find out in what ways we can teach the cab drivers about basic first aid -OR- I'll be heading to Patan hospital to start in on inventory. Apparently they have an abundance of meds that need cataloged and I'm going to try and take that. It is basically my stab at "donations management" and we'll see how many Excel spreadsheets I create.Toby has me meeting up with Amit (a physician) to do that and then possibly another physician who needs additional help in one of the field hospitals near here. We will see what tomorrow will bring.

SIM Card

I have been fighting with the other phone I brought all day, and frankly it was about to get shipped to Abu Dhabi (C'mon Garfield reference!). I had practically given up on it when
the reader finally decided to recognize it for some reason. Hallelujah!  So now, fingers crossed, I'll finally be able to call all of my contacts with the phone numbers Toby sent me and I won't have to rely so heavily on email.

The good part is Whatsapp has been a Godsend! I've been able to communicate very well with my husband and sister back home as long as I'm on Wi-Fi. And I really owe it to my friend from Costa Rica, Gabríel, for teaching me about this app in the first place. I've been using it for roughly a year to communicate with him in Costa Rica. As long as Wi-Fi is available, it works great for free international calls.
Facetime has also been nice. I used it via iPad over Wi-Fi and it worked well to speak to my staff back home. They were letting me know about the flooding back home; down to a dull roar.

I spoke to another colleague of mine over Facebook messenger, which was nice. We were kind of talking as department heads and discussing some future improvements that could be made from lessons learned from the most recent go around. The highlight of this conversation is this colleague's sense of humor...very witty and made me laugh even though I was nearly passing out from jet lag. (You know who you are, and I needed that. Thanks!)

I'm thinking some additional PR may be in order in reference to the dam and flooding, but we shall see how it goes. However, I'm in Nepal and I'll let my staff do their thing while I'm here; I'm working in Nepal for the time being.

**Sigh** My name is Lindsie, and I'm a workaholic. See, I admit it. Okay?

Time for sleep. I need to be up in a few hours to wish my Dad a "Happy Father's Day" from Nepal and then meet with Bernie to determine what tomorrow will bring.