Doctors for Nepal live from Kathmandu

It's been 24hrs now since Becca Brady, the last member of our team arrived in Kathmandu, the rest of our group having flown out problem free, arriving on Monday evening, bellies full of plane food (or verging on the empty side). Our cultural awareness was tested early on as Kate, Maia and I caught our connection from Bahrain to Kathmandu, with a plane full of Nepalese workers. Whether they were truly on holiday in Bahrain is very dubious, our thoughts tending more towards mass East Asian migration being shipped out to the Middle East as cheap labour. Sounds very familiar....

Even though part of our team is already old hands, we were all overwhelmed by the beauty and richness that the streets of Kathmandu revealed to us. But in like every developing country, behind the exotic beauty and cultural overflow which turns street dust into gold before our Western eyes, we also have also witnessed afflicting poverty, dereliction and near absence of sanitation. Nevertheless, everywhere we have been so far, we have been warmly greeted with open arms.

Today we visited Lalit's wonderful wife, Aruna, her adorable little girl Alen and her family. They live in a suburb of Kathmandu, where fields have rapidly been replaced by houses for the constantly increasing population. They welcomed us like kings. We were treated to a feast of food, where what we thought was a more than filling main turned out to be a small starter then followed by an tremendously copious starter.

Aruna was also extremely proud to show us her newly opened beauty parlour down the road from their house. She very gracefully insisted in giving all the ladies of the group a very comprehensive eye-brow threading session, bringing most of us to tears...