Two Nurses In Remotest Nepal

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30389, 13 March 1964, Page 2

Two Nurses In Remotest Nepal

[By a heuter Correspondent] DANDELDHURA, Western Nepal. Two British women, living deep in mountains of Western Nepal, are to bring medical help to hundreds of thousands of people who have never known skilled medical care before.

Four days’ march over the mountains from the nearest road, the two women live in a little stone house among the villagers. They are Dr. Katherine Young, aged 55, from Edinburgh, and Liverpool-born Miss Amy Andrew, aged 58. The Government of Nepal has given them permits to work for 10 years in this remote region. Dr. Young is the only doctor in an area

the size of Wales, and sometimes it takes her patients two months or more to reach her little clinic. Dr. Young was born in China of medical missionary parents and has devoted her life to medical work first in India, and now in Nepal. She is an expert on leprosy, which is widespread in the hill areas. “I came out to India in 1937 and found a personal interest in leper patients,” she said. “In 1944, I became medical superintendent of a leper asylum at Pithoragarh, in Almora district, and I built a hospital and used to go trekking through the hills teaching people how leprosy could be treated. “Some 12 years ago, I set up a little dispensary of my own in the area made famous by Jim Corbett’s stories of man-eating tigers and leonards. “I remember how I jumped once when, while I sat reading one of his stories, ‘The

Man-eaters of Champawat,’ near the very plate, a leopard suddenly roared just outside the hut.” “It was there that a pandit (a learned Hindu) came to me with leprosy. He had walked for 10 days to find me, been told that I had moved, walked home again and then learned that I had, in fact, moved only a few miles. So he walked back again. “I was able to treat his leprosy and arrest it. The sequel came about three years ago when Indian frontier regulations would have forced us to move. This Pandit heard about it and insisted that we must move to his home area of Nepal. “He took us there and collected a nine-foot long petition on which local people had put their thumbprints asking the Nepalese Government to permit us to work there. They gave the permit very quickly and now the Pandit helps us by translating the local dialects.”

Miss Andrew has been able to contribute her skill as a dispenser to Dr. Young’s work. “I used to have my own chemist’s shop in London,” she said, “but about 10 years ago I decided I should like to do something for needy people. The missionary societies would not take me because they said I was too old, but they put me in touch with Dr. Young. So I sold my shop and sailed for ■lndia. . The interest on the money I got from the shop goes towards our work and keep. “It was quite a change from London. The journey over the rough mountain tracks to join Dr. Young was very strenuous. “Now we have moved to Nepal it .is even more difficult. It takes four days to reach the nearest road- We can ride ponies only half the way. The rest is too rough and steep, and now that we are getting older we long for something like a helicopter which would help us get around.”

The two women are kept very busy. During the last nine months and a half they have treated 27,000 cases, including 800 lepers. “At night all round our little hut, we see the flickering fires in the fields and on the hillsides where patients are camping before coming to see us in the morning,” said Dr. Young. “We have had to institute a ticket system so that there is an orderly queue. Then we have a little dog, called Sanoo Raja, who rushes out and takes care of anyone who tries to jump the queue. It always makes people laugh, the way he frightens big strong men.” The medical work is financed by contributions from Dr. Young’s and Miss Andrew’s friends. Dr. Young writes a newsletter about her work which her sister, Mrs Weller of Edinburgh, distributes.

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