The Bus Club

We were hungry. It had been a long hike exploring the everlasting beauty of Arba village in Nepal where mountains stand grand and gracious, and cows look like roaming in the clouds. As four of us - two Nepalese, two foreigners - were strolling back, one of our Nepalese friends said: “Now pick a house for lunch.”

We smiled at the idea first, but there was nothing unusual at all. Our Nepalese friends knew the people in the village, and at some point all locals seemed to be uncles and aunties. So, that's what we did – we stopped at a random house to ask whether we could have lunch. The house looked rather big from outside. Ten people were living there – two sons with their wives and children, a mother, a father and a grandmother. The mother of the family immediately offered us chairs. Then she brought corn and asked to separate maize kernels from the cob. While doing that, our Nepalese friends wondered whether we had strong teeth for eating popcorn. The question amused me as I didn't remember popcorn required strong teeth, but well. “I guess I have,” I said.

Meanwhile it started raining, and we moved to the porch. We had finished our work, and soon the mother of the family brought us hot tea and the “popcorn”. Then I understood why the strength of my teeth had mattered. When you make popcorn at home, there will always be a few corn seeds that burn or so to say – don't pop white and crispy, and soft as popcorn should be. You would often throw them away as they are not edible. On the plate that the mother gave us, none of the seeds had popped.

We were laughing about the fact that it was still called “popcorn”. But being hungry we didn't care - we started cracking the burnt seeds, and instead of a real popcorn we listened to the rain drops that kept popping on the roof above us. Pop. Pop. Pop.

Then I noticed what else had not popped. In the other corner, there was a grandmother lying on a blanket. She was 85 years old watching us with weary eyes. She wondered what these two foreigners were doing here.

“Are they doctors? Will they see me?” she asked in Nepalese.

“No, they won't. They are not doctors,” one of our Nepalese friends replied.

The grandmother was suffering from diabetes, but she remembered very well that, last time when they were visited by foreigners, those had been doctors giving free medical treatment to the local people in Arba. Also to the grandmother.