Kindness in Kathmandu

            

         Pinkey Malla with Sanmani Rai in her tent "home"
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Michelle Mahlik, Board member, reporting:

I first encountered Sanmani Rai when she took pity on me in a Kathmandu church service and shared a precious cough drop. Just a few months later, the 2015 earthquake forced she and her elderly husband to move into the kind of temporary housing that thousands of Nepali people are currently living in. Imagine camping for over a year in the cold Himalayan mountains in a drafty, damp, dark tent, heated only with a few pieces of scavenged wood.  Mrs. Rai makes a living by picking "nettles" and selling them door to door. In America, we consider nettles to be pesky, stinging "weeds", but the Nepali people know that they are filled with nutrients.

 

In her own charming Nepali-English, our healthcare worker tells us how she tenderly watches over Mrs. Rai:

 

"Her neighbor helped her to get call to me. I came to know that she has vomiting the whole day and night yesterday and became so week. Because she is so poor and no money to treatment, immediately I have to go to doctor and I came to know that she got food poison. So I feed her slowly some breakfast and after having medicine, electrolyte now she is OK. She was so scared and cried before but after immediate treatment now she felt so relief. She collect some money by selling some green leafs by going door to door of peoples. They don't have cook stove also and they have to cook by fire in their small tent house."

                                                     Pinkey Malla