by Honora Wolfe

Nepal is a very long way from home, both in physical and cultural distance, as our first day of treating patients clearly illustrated. On Fridays, our regular treatment room at the SheChen Clinic in Boudha (the suburb of Kathmandu where sits the Great Stupa with the famous eyes) is used by a homeopath, so we decided to jump right into the swing of things and go up the mountain to a place called Nagi Gompa to treat the community of perhaps 100 Tibetan Buddhist nuns who live there.

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While not exactly nuns in the same sense that we think of Catholic nuns, it is the closest word in English that we have for the status and life of these women. There is little obvious hierarchy among the women, lay people come and go at will as visitors to the nuns themselves, visiting the grounds to meditate there, or even just to have a picnic and take in the fabulous view of the Kathmandu valley below. The jeep trail one must take to get to Nagi Gompa and back is 2 kilometers of bone-rattling rock, sand, and mud with no guard rails and could only loosely be called a "road," but the driver navigates it regularly and seemed to know what he was doing.

Nagi Gompa was for many years under the direction of one of my own teacher’s first meditation masters, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, who was the spiritual director and guide there until 1996. It lies within one of Nepal’s many national parks and allows the wide, expansive view of earth and sky that is, for many people, a great aid to a contemplative or spiritual life.

We arrived there about 10 AM, paid our respects in the temple, set up our simple treatment room with four mattresses on the floor, our box of treatment supplies (which turned out to be barely adequate for the patients’ needs), and with an empty water bottle as a ‘sharps’ container. In five hours, we did our best to treat 21 women. We saw all manner of joint pain, headaches, fatigue, and what they called “sinus” condition, but actually appeared to be allergies with congestion and headaches after more extensive questioning. These women live simple, hardworking lives, rising early for group ceremonies, working outside for some hours each day, and eating a very simple diet. They appear to have very minimal access to any health care. We could have probably treated 20 more if we could have stayed longer and I felt sorry not to have a full pharmacy, all sizes of needles, a full complement of types of moxa. Despite the limitations, these women were so happy to see us and so grateful that we came it was almost embarrassing.

The long and short of it is that we have no clue how blessed and spoiled we are until we come to a place like this. We will go back again to Nagi Gompa in two weeks, but it’s not nearly enough.