I'm in Kathmandu for my annual medical checkup. A dental cleaning (no cavities), a physical, and stool/urine/blood tests.  I'll be here until the weekend. The physical exam went fine -- I'll find out the results of the stool exam on Wednesday. I'll be surprised if they don't find something living inside me.

Virginia has organized a few trainings at the women's center for the monsoon season. I think the greatest benefit of the trainings is that they give other PCVs an excuse to escape their posts during the long monsoon months, and ensure that we will have a steady string of visitors. There will be one week of trainings given by Sarah (the English nurse/midwife VSO volunteer in Janakpur) in which she will explain to PCVs how they can teach women's health in their villages. Other PCVs will be coming to interview the employees at the center to capture their stories and allow us to create biographies of the women (with a women's empowerment angle for some sort of future publication hopefully). The last training will invite PCVs to come and paint with the women and take them on visits to other Maithili villages 
to find new imagery and designs - all to help the women come up with some new ideas for their art. Anyway, nothing too stressful for us to deal with. We're really just calling the projects "trainings" in order to apply for money through the Coca Cola fund which is earmarked for training activities. I'm also still working on my "costing" project in which I'm transferring the most relevant business information at the center onto the computer, and calculating what we should be charging for our products (currently, my findings suggest we should be charging about twice what we are).

I was also going to ask if you'd discussed travel plans any further. If you could take time off in October (I have the entire month off for Dasain and Tihar), we could meet in Germany. That would probably be the cheapest destination for everyone -- there aren't many direct flights out of Kathmandu, but there is one to Frankfurt. I don't think I want to travel anymore during monsoon, especially around south Asia.

I'll talk to you soon.

Love,
Mark