Poorest on the Planet {3/22}
Mathi Thuma village, located on the way to Rara lake. Some of the photos in this series were later used to illustrate an article (below) in INF's 'Today in Nepal' magazine.
Poorest on the Planet?
People in Nepal's Mugu district are among the poorest on earth. Many of the children here die before the age of 5. INF's Mugu Programme Manager Mark Galpin reports on his latest visit to this remote, mountainous area, which is badly affected by the Maoist 'People's War'.
The monsoon is not the time to travel to Mugu. The helicopter flight was the first for three weeks. We were crammed in and the rotors were going round before the flight was called off because of bad weather. Two days later we had better luck. There were seven passengers, including the new government doctor for Mugu. I was going to have the privilege of introducing him to his new working area. His enthusiasm and excitement were infectious.
Since the helicopter was the first to reach Mugu for weeks, the struggle to get on the return flight was fierce, but we had finally arrived and it doesn't pay to think too hard about how and when you will get back.
Next morning we left for Nigale, a village two hours' walk away, perched high above the Mugu Karnali river. INF had been working here for eighteen months. I had visited Nigale soon after we had started work there and my main memory was of walking carefully along the paths to avoid the excrement. Even from a long way off, changes were noticeable. In addition to the houses, stacked on top of one another, there were little huts - toilets, some with vegetables growing on top to maximise the use of space.
The first house we went to belonged to Jansila Rokaya, one of two local women trained by INF in their work as 'traditional birth attendants'. Jansila explained that over the last eighteen months twelve women in the village had had babies. She and the other traditional birth attendant had been at ten of these deliveries and later ensured that the mothers and their babies had vaccinations. As for the other two deliveries, one woman had been referred to the regional centre Nepalgunj and the other had given birth on the path to Gamgadhi.
Jansila was proud of her work. Her face shone as she described the changes she had helped to bring about. She explained that women were now giving birth in houses, or at least moved into houses within a few hours of delivery. This represents a radical change from the traditional twenty-day period that women used to spend in the livestock shed during and after delivery. But Jansila had her own tragic story too. She had been pregnant seventeen times but only had one son. He was now four years old, but she was afraid that if he died she and her husband would be childless.