Hardship and Happiness

P7280005, a photo by pholaphat on Flickr.

After a day of health clinic in Ladakh, the family of the farm that we were camping at asked one of my colleagues and I to visit his grandmother. She was not in good enough health to make the trek to the clinic site. After walking through the fields and past several irrigation ditches we came up to her home. She had fallen down these steep stairs that run from the roof of her home into her house. She had clearly had at the very least some compression fractures in her spine. It was amazing to see her still doing work around the house and in the fields. We offered what little we could in terms of pain control. It was amazing to see what commitment her family had in taking care of her and how active of a member she remained in her community. Our western society could really learn a lot from Ladakhis.