Chitwan Wheelchair Warehouse

We went to Chitwan to clean up a warehouse in preparation for receiving and storing nearly 1,000 wheelchairs. This is a picture of what the warehouse looked like when we started. When we finished it looked like a warehouse with bare concrete floors and was relatively clean. It took three workers all day to clean it out.

 

This is the entrance to the warehouse.

We went to lunch at a local restaurant with our NGO partners. There was a green parrot walking around on the floor. The parrot liked it if you gave it rice. I discovered that it liked rice with some curry sauce more than plain rice

 

This is a picture of two of the trucks delivering the wheelchairs. These trucks are about 3-ton, TATA brand, trucks that are built like tanks. They travel throughout Nepal and have to be very rugged.

Next door to the warehouse is the home of owner of the warehouse and adjoining property.  

Near the warehouse is a statue of a rhinoceros. Chitwan is the location a famous national park. In the park you can get a close-up view of an Asian rhinoceros. It is a very rare and endangered species.

This is a picture of Lear with a little girl named Laxmi. Laxmi lives in a small house adjoining the warehouse. Her house looks much like the warehouse. Her father makes a living hauling freight with a modified bicycle like the one pictured below. 

To get the wheelchairs from the road into the warehouse the unloading team used a modified bicycle shown in this picture.  This is like the one that Laxmi's father uses to make his living.

Junior Primary, Visiting Professor, Thanksgiving Chicken, Lucky the Cat and a Bus Ride

This is a picture of our Junior Primary classes (Sunday School for you non-Mormons). They are coloring pictures and being helped by Sister Pratima, the second councilor in the primary presidency, who is supervising. Lear is the first counselor.

This is a picture of us, the Oliphants (our companion missionary couple) and the Steve Thygerson family. Steve is a professor in the Health Sciences Dept. at BYU. He was in Nepal for a couple of months teaching at a Nepali university. He brought his family along and they had a great cultural experience. They saw the biggest spiders and met nicest people in the world. There are probably bigger spiders but no people are nicer than the Nepali. A lot of people from the USA visit Nepal so we see a lot of Americans.

You can't get a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner so we made do with three baked chickens. Our landlord and an expat named Rose prepared the chickens. They live upstairs from our apartments.

This is a picture of our Thanksgiving feast.

This is a picture of Rose's cat named Lucky. Lucky is lying on a table basking in the sun. He is the fattest and biggest house cat we have ever seen. He must weigh 35 pounds. When a visiting Nepali asked our landlord why Lucky was so fat our landlord replied that Lucky was an American cat. That satisfied the man who had inquired about Lucky. The man simply nodded his head and said that he understood. You see in Nepal and throughout the less developed world Americans are often viewed as over weight, far to affluent and usually self indulgent. They are probably correct in this view of us.

Elder Joe Oliphant and I have been using public transportation when practical. Pictured here is a public bus that is actually owned and operated by a private individual but licensed by the government. You pay about 30 rupees (that is about 30 cents) for a two to five mile ride across town. Joe has a PhD and is a retired chemical engineer. He is a good fit for Nepal since he designed and built chemical plants around the world.

A picture from the back of the bus.