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Every spring, many thousands of Westerners travel high in the Himalayas to climb Everest and other mountains. Because of them, many thousands of Nepalese work to guide them, carry their belongings, and build facilities for the tourists -all at altitudes at which people do not normally live. Dr. Luanne Freer established a medical clinic at Everest Base Camp in 2003 to address the health issues that come with high-altitude tourism. Not only was the base camp area lacking medical expertise, but local people who worked in the tourism industry (and could not pay for care) were being ignored elsewhere.
The ER’s locale might be glamorous, but the work is often not. Headaches, diarrhea, upper respiratory infections, anxiety and ego-related issues disguised as physical ailments are the clinic’s daily bread and butter. And although the clinic’s resources have expanded dramatically over the past nine years, there is no escaping the fact that this is a seasonal clinic housed in a canvas tent located at 17,590 feet. When serious incidents do occur, Freer and her colleagues must problem solve with a severely limited toolbox. Often the handiest implement is duct tape.
“There is no rule book that says, ‘When you’re at 18,000 feet and this happens, do x.’ Medicine freezes solid, tubing snaps in the icy winds, batteries die—nothing is predictable,” says Freer. But it’s that challenge that keeps Freer and many of her colleagues coming back. This back-to-basics paradigm also engenders a more old-fashioned doctor-patient relationship that Freer misses when practicing in the States.
Read more about Dr. Freer and she clinic she established at Smithsonian. Link
(Image credit: Molly Loomis)
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Linguists working in a remote area of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh discovered a language spoken by 800 people that is totally unlike any language that’s ever been cataloged. It’s called Koro.
“Their language is quite distinct on every level—the sound, the words, the sentence structure,” said Gregory Anderson, director of the nonprofit Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, who directs the project’s research. Details of the language will be documented in an upcoming issue of the journal Indian Linguistics.[...]
Languages like Koro “construe reality in very different ways,” Dr. Anderson said. “They uniquely code knowledge of the natural world in ways that cannot be translated into a major language.”[...]
Moreover, it was masked by the unusual language diversity of the area, where so many languages are spoken that they seem to intermingle effortlessly in streams of thought. Indeed, the local Koro speakers themselves didn’t consider theirs a separate language, even though it is as distinct from those spoken by other villagers as English is from Russian, the researchers said.
This language has no written form, so researchers are working quickly to learn its grammar and vocabulary in order to preserve it against extinction.
Link via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo: National Geographic
The remote Mustang caves of Nepal are yielding treasures and artworks that lead explorers to think it may be the legendary Shangri-La. Expeditions in 2007 and 2008 found 15th-century paintings, religious texts, and skeletons. The expeditions were led by US researcher Broughton Coburn and veteran mountaineer Pete Athans.
The unusual treasures have led Coburn and his team to suggest that the Mustang caves could be linked to “hidden valleys” thought to represent the Buddhist spiritual paradise known as Shambhala.
“Shambhala is also believed by many scholars to have a geographical parallel that may exist in several or many Himalayan valleys,” Coburn said.
“These hidden valleys were created at times of strife and when Buddhist practice and principals were threatened,” Coburn said. “The valleys contained so-called hidden treasure texts.”
Elaine Brook, author of Search for Shambhala, said the hidden valleys of Mustang indeed “have some of the characteristics of the mythical land of Shambhala.”
For his 1933 novel, Hilton used the concept of Shambhala as the basis for his “lost” valley of Shangri-La, an isolated mountain community that was a storehouse of cultural wisdom.
PBS will air two specials about the Mustang caves tonight. Link
(image credit: Kris Erickson)
