Friday May 18th

Today the students were busy with clinicals this morning, so we decided to use the time to buy ingredients for our Canadian food party tonight! We invited all the students to come over to our place and try some Canadian food. It was kind of hard to pick a Canadian food to make because, well, what is Canadian food? We kind of narrowed it down to poutine and maple syrup, unfortunately making poutine would have been a bit too difficult here! We ended up making pancakes with maple syrup and we added some fruit and whip cream to give it a bit more substance.
After buying the ingredients we went back to the school for PBL wrap up. We really liked it last time, but this session it seemed like some of the students weren't understanding the answers to the questions and weren't saying they didn't understand it. It could have been because the concepts were more difficult this week than last week, or maybe the students just thought they could figure it our later. Either way, it seemed like it wasn't as beneficial as last week. To finish the students immunology block, Dr. Pastor and Dr. Sabita organized a jeopardy session after lunch. When we asked the students if they were excited, many of them said they didn't know what jeopardy was! Despite this, the session was a huge success! It was a really enjoyable learning environment, and might be put in after each block.
The party started at 6pm, so we were busy most of the afternoon getting ready. Although we invited all of the students, we thought 30, maybe 40 would show up. It ended up being over 50 students crammed into our guest house. Everybody had a great time and the students really enjoyed trying our kind of Canadian food!

                                          

Thursday May 17th

Today has been one of the first days of the many bandhs -- a Nepali strike that is occurring now because of the upcoming implementation of the constitution. Although the strikes are very rarely violent, they disrupt transport and shops throughout the city. This can be very frustrating for the students and faculty at PAHS, since they are one of the few academic institutions that continue during the bandhs. Many of the students live in the hostel that is only 10 minutes away, but this isn't the case for all the students, nor for many of the faculty. In a talk today with Dr. Shambhu -- in which he was mostly just making sure our stay here has been as good as possible, something all the PAHS faculty have been so great about -- he mentioned that he has to walk an hour to get to the school now. This isn't even the worst, some of the students have to walk 2.5 hours to school when there is no transportation.

Wednesday May 16th

Today was the students self-study day, but before they started studying we went to a movie with them at one of the theaters in Kathmandu. Afterwards Jordan played in a soccer game with the students, the rest of use decided to take it easy for the remainder of the day!

Tuesday May 15th

For most of us, today was our best day yet in Nepal. The students had organized a dance party for us, and since none of us are the most avid of dancers, we were somewhat daunted by the prospect of having to dance for four hours straight. After attending some lectures and PBL, we met with the students at their hostel and we started rolling over to the “Timber House” dance hall. The students, the girls especially, were unbelievably excited, dressed up in their best party clothes. We were pleased to find out that the dance floor was simply an outdoor terrace, since it was sizzling hot out once again. In the end, the four hours passed by so quickly and we had a fantastic time! Afterwards, we came to the consensus that we much preferred the Nepali dance music to the Western music we find at clubs at home… so we’re definitely going to have to buy some of it. After everyone was exhausted from the dancing, the students invited us over to their hostel canteen for dinner. The huge amount of dhal bhat was the perfect end to a great night -- thanks to all the PAHS students for organizing it!

Monday, May 14th

Dr. Pastor started off the day with a second lecture on signal transduction, which was very well done. Talking with him after, we discussed how in our undergrad we learned much of his lecture over an entire semester, not just 2 hours. Although we did learn it in more detail, it is still difficult to pick up even the basic concepts in such a short time – one of the difficulties with starting medical school directly from high school. Afterwards we helped the students with some of the general concepts from their PBL, such as organ donor matching and blood transfusion. The students use many different textbooks, making it difficult to get the same information -- especially because some textbooks are much older than others -- which can lead to a bit of confusion. 

At the end of the day we did a presentation on time management. Since we have gone through our undergrad, we had a few tips that we had picked up along the way. Overall we thought it went well, and many of the students downloaded the presentation on their USB.

Sunday, May 13th

The beginning of the school week started with an hour-long lecture and PBL. The workload is a bit smaller on Sunday, giving the students some time to go through their PBL learning objectives. Since the students didn’t have any questions yet and mostly wanted to start reading on the PBL, we decided to spend the afternoon in Bhaktapur – an ancient city an hour outside Kathmandu. It had a much slower pace than Kathmandu, and some beautiful old architecture. 

Saturday, May 12

Today is the students’ day off, so in the morning we visited Pashupatina, one of the most famous Hindu temples in Nepal – definitely a must see in Kathmandu! In the afternoon there was a soccer game that we went to with a few of the students. It was a Nepali soccer club vs and Indian club. The Nepali club hadn’t won in a while, so the expectation weren’t very high for this game. Before the game we bought jerseys – the students already had there’s on – and while waiting in line were getting a lot of smiles and pictures taken of us. Our picture ended up being on the biggest soccer website in Nepal, goalnepal.com.