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Himalayan Family Healthcare Project volunteers Cybill Esguerra (left), a fourth-year medical student at Saint Louis University, and Tsering Samthen Ghale hike to Dharapani, in the Manang District in northern Nepal.
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After working at the Himalayan Family Healthcare Project medical camp in Thonche, Dr. Marisha Dahal, a dental volunteer from Kathmandu, makes her way across the Marshyangdi River to a guest house in Dharapani.
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Volunteers Dr. Rick Bowen of St. Louis, Dr. Samip Shrestha of Kathmandu, and Dr. Dani Silvestre of São Paulo, Brazil, discuss a patient who they think may have appendicitis.
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Patients form a line while waiting to enter the triage area of the medical camp in Thonche, population 170. Some patients walked several hours from nearby villages to visit the clinic.
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Dr. Sumit Singh extracts a tooth. The medical team had to improvise with supplies and the facilities, inside a school in Thonche.
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A young patient carries medicine back home after being seen by doctors at the medical camp in Tilche.
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Children sit patiently during a fluoride treatment at the medical camp in Tilche. Children and their parents also attended a class to learn about proper dental care.
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Bowen and Daniel Danilczyk, a nurse at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, place an IV line in a young patient while treating infected wounds on her leg and foot.
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Esguerra checks on a villager complaining of severe chest pain at a guesthouse in Dharapani.
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Clouds roll in over Tilche as volunteers hike back to the guesthouses. The village sits at approximately 7,300 feet above sea level.
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Prakash Shahi (left), a project coordinator for the medical mission and an electrical engineer who lives in St. Louis, and Dr. Shubha Argal of Kathmandu (second from left) dance with other volunteers and villagers during a welcome party in Tilche.
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After spending the week volunteering, Esguerra makes the rough three-hour jeep ride through the mountains on the way back to Kathmandu.
There were supposed to be jeeps. Then the monsoon season lasted longer than expected, so the small band of healthcare professionals and porters trekked three hours to the village of Tilche in Manang District, Nepal, one of the poorest places on Earth, where scattered villages are isolated by a rugged landscape and reaching the nearest hospital is a day-long journey.
This is where Devi Gurung States (left) grew up. When he was 15, his parents died. He was too young to work and soon ended up homeless. Devi developed a friendship with another homeless boy, and together they eked out a life, until Devi’s friend fell ill. “I couldn’t take him to the hospital,” he recalls, “so I lost him.”
Eventually, Devi became a dishwasher at a local restaurant. There, he met his future foster father, Dr. James H. States, who was visiting Nepal to climb Mount Everest. The doctor took an interest in the teen, who told him about his dreams to own a restaurant and “do something that would improve the health of children that were suffering as I was.”
After moving to St. Louis, Devi opened Everest Café & Bar in 2004. Five years later, he founded the Himalayan Family Healthcare Project, which started as a two-week visit from healthcare professionals to the Manang District. Now, with help from the St. Louis–based nonprofit Wings of Hope, Devi plans to build a 15-bed hospital. In an area where dental chairs are made from school desks and doctors wear headlamps to work past dusk because there’s no electricity, the facility could have a huge impact. —Rosalind Early
Photojournalist Whitney Curtis travels to Nepal to record the impact the Himalayan Family Healthcare Project is making.
Photography and captions by Whitney Curtis
