A Glimpse of Eternal Snows by Jane Wilson-Howarth

The family does a lot of trekking and taking David about in a basket, and he seems to enjoy the different sights and particularly the sounds. In Nepal, most people coo and ah over his baby cuteness and his curly blonde hair first, then ask why he isn’t standing up on his own legs yet or talking. Eventually Jane says “Is this going to improve David’s quality of life, or make him feel better? Can you stop him from vomiting all the time?” When they can’t tell her yes, she disconnects the tubes from her unhappy baby and flies back to Nepal.Īlthough Jane sees that Nepaliis don’t always treat the disabled well, she prefers their blunt straightforwardness to the awkward avoidance of Westerners, who stare at David but don’t interact with him. Doctors want to keep taking his blood and testing, testing, testing. And drugs are hard to come by.)īut soon Western medicine reaches the limits of what it can do for David. (In Nepali hospitals, doctors and nurses will not deal with bodily fluids–it is beneath their high-caste status. (Jane wonders if the pesticides and chemicals she was exposed to in Pakistan could have caused this.)Īs a doctor, Jane knows that giving birth in the U.K., with its high-tech machines, high standards of cleanliness, and plentiful pain-relieving medications and antibiotics has probably saved her life, and the life of her son. David has two holes in his heart, only one kidney, an oversized head, and is missing the ganglia that normally connect the two halves of your brain. Trouble begins when Jane gives birth to a second son, David, who is born with all sorts of problems.

Their small son Alexander is soon fluent in Nepali and Tharu. His job is to help improve irrigation in Nepal, and he’s based alternatively in Kathmandu and in very rural Rajapur, an island on the Indian border. MD Jane Wilson-Howarth and her water engineer husband Simon are living in Nepal as he works for Asia Bank.

I loved this book and wanted to stay in its world forever. An easy read that took me right back to my days in northern India, although it is about an English family’s adventures in southern Nepal. Coming to you as the former property of the Cumbria Council Library in England

A Glimpse of Eternal Snows by Jane Wilson-Howarth