Final Destination, Nepal Edition

There is a popular movie series called Final Destination depicting graphic accidental deaths. It is quite intriguing, showing how cause and effect can lead to bizarre, fatal situations. For instance, a person leaves something on the stove, which catches fire, and then the person comes in to put it out with the bathroom towel, which naturally catches fire, so the person climbs down the fire escape, which malfunctions, and the person falls to the ground, and is then beheaded by the ladder falling down on them.


--Painting at a temple in a Tibetan refugee camp in Pokhara--

Accidental deaths have played a prominent role in my experience here in Nepal the last week. It all started when my friend Gautam told me a story of his friend, a Sherpa man from the mountains, who spent his early years as a trekking guide before marrying his Austrian trekking client and moving to Austria. He and his wife had just eaten dinner at Gautam’s house in Kathmandu two weeks before. The day before I met with Gautam, the man was going on a hike in the Alps and a freak avalanche came down and killed him.

The next day, my friend invited me to come to a bar near a major intersection close to my neighborhood. I declined because I had to leave for the mountain town of Pokhara the next morning. Within an hour of that call, a city bus that was racing two other buses in a reckless and juvenile competition, sped out of control onto a crowded sidewalk, killing six people and injuring dozens. The locals were enraged and torched all three racing buses to a crisp as they fought off police and blocked Kathmandu’s major highway for three hours.

Two days ago, my friend and I were attending a Tibetan cultural performance in Pokhara, which was meant to raise money for Tibetan schools. Our friend, a comic, was the M.C. With about 45 minutes to go in the show, two members of rival Tibetan refugee camp gangs started exchanging words, and one smashed his motorcycle helmet over the other’s head. After some punches were exchanged, the other took out a 2 foot long knife (pretty much a sword) and stabbed the other right in the center of his chest plate below his ribs. Many people screamed and evacuated the concert hall right in the middle of a performance. As my friend and I looked on, the boy’s friends helped him out of the concert hall. About 20 feet from us, we saw him, with 14 inches of the knife handle sticking out from his chest and his shirt soaked with blood. He thankfully survived after two full bags of blood transfusions.

Yesterday, my friend and I were returning from Pokhara in a taxi, and as we approached the hill to the monastery, came to a stop. I looked ahead and saw a dump truck full of rocks stopped in the middle of the road. Beneath the truck was what
appeared to be a man doing some maintenance under the truck. However, the driver got a better look at him and saw he was actually dead. We got out and saw that an 18-year old boy from the nearby Handicapped Handicraft village (a place similar to Goodwill employing handicapped people) had been run over by the dump truck. The accident was not caused by reckless behavior, but by unfortunate happenstance. Just as the truck was coming up the corner, building up speed for the steep hill, his front tire clipped the handicapped boy’s crutch and the boy fell down and his head was run over by the rear tire. The top of the boy’s skull was severed and his brain had become dislodged about 3 feet away. A stream of blood flowed down the hill, indicating that the accident had happened within a minute or so of our arrival. The driver had fled and there were no eyewitnesses. Even though the accident happened within a few feet of a town’s main intersection, we were the first on the scene. I said some prayers that the boy’s spirit might find it’s way to a better place, believing that his spirit was violently flung from his body (how ghosts are made).

It is a very quiet town with very little traffic, so the people were in total shock. Some women cried and some young boys went closer to get a look at the carnage. Some people from the handicraft village arrived later, and apparently expressed their rage at the situation by setting fire to the inside of the truck. The police came to restore order and the crowd was relatively calm after that. My friend requested that I take some photos of the accident, the least graphic of which I am putting here.

The incident hit close to home at our monastery, as the truck was headed to dump rocks for a construction project we are working on. Those rocks never arrived, and sadly, the boy will never again make it to work at the handicraft village.