Caitlin Dreisbach ’12, a biology and society and communications double major, participated in the Cornell-Nepal Study Program (CNSP) in the spring of 2011 and studied the perception of alcohol consumption and its effects on lactation in rural Nepal.

Sarah Shearer '12 traveled to Nepal for her semester abroad where she conducted research on maternal health. 

Surrounded by stately buildings, freshly mowed lawns and well maintained walkways, it is hard to imagine replacing these marks of refinement with stray dogs, overflowing sewers and ubiquitous putrid smells — things that commonly adorn a snapshot of life in Nepal.

In addition to the poor living conditions, Nepal is struggling to recover from the 10-year civil war that ended in 2006. The United States believes the conditions are not stable enough to lift the travel warning on Nepal or remove the Maoists, the major ruling party in the republic, from the terror black list. With lingering concerns about safety, fewer students have participated in the Cornell-Nepal Study Program (CNSP), the only program that Cornell Abroad exclusively administers.

As the applause in Risley dining hall subsided, Dr. Mohan Man Sainju stood up in front of the red Nepalese national flag and faced the audience. On Saturday, the vice chairperson of the Poverty Alleviation Fund in Nepal and former royal Nepalese ambassador to the U.S. and Canada fixed the audience with a solemn gaze and began his speech on the prospects of Nepal’s development.

Kathmandu, NEPAL — Saturday, 6 a.m., somewhere on the East-West Highway: A bus driver hits and kills an old Nepali woman. Her death, though accidental, causes her entire village to create a massive roadblock out of overturned bags of onions and sheer willpower, effectively shutting down all transport between Kathmandu and Pokhara.

There’s a lot Nepal has that America doesn’t: An overabundance of dal-bhat, load-shedding, hoards of small children who attack you asking for a chocolate, scary amounts of pollution that make the sun burn bright red in the sky in the middle of the afternoon, severed pig and goat heads sometimes still covered in fur and lying appetizingly out just waiting to be bought and fried up and, of course, E

“Didi.”

There are fingers reaching in my window. I sink down lower in my seat.

“DIDI.”

I really don’t want to deal with this right now.

“Didi, please, I am so hungry, can you give some money?”

With the hand that isn’t hanging on my moving cab for dear life, he motions food in his mouth.

People love to warn you about what you’ll miss when you’re abroad: family and friends, cable, CTB, linguistic fluency or the ability to take a hot shower without waiting an hour and wasting half a pond-ful of water. But of all the things I thought I’d be homesick for, I never thought my own chest would be one of them.

Hi, and welcome to my double moving party. I used to have a column in Arts, but I obviously wore down someone enough to let me move, and here I am, in my new swankified space.