3c DOUGLAS COLLEGE

LETTER FROM BARRY LEACH ARCHIVES

 

As several members of faculty and staff have been asking
me where Barry Leach is and what he is doing, I pass on to you
the highlights of a letter just received from Trekking, Nepal
dated October 3lst.

"T had a meeting with the staff of volunteers from U.K.
and Australia at the Dellk Tibetan Hospital at Dharamsala and
agreed to use part of the Brett Fund to train Community Health
Nurses. They will be using David Werner's book, 'Where There
Is No Doctor' as their basic guide. (David Werner is Director
of the Hesperian Foundation, Project Piaxtia, Palo Alto, Calif.).
Similar arrangements will also be made with the Asian Institute
for Rural Development. This alone makes the trip worthwhile.
However, we have also set up a metal workers training scheme for
Tibetan Refugees, and also helped towards an International ar-
rangement involving Saudi Arabia and Canadian aid for the pro-
vision of housing for destitute Tibetan Moslems in Kashmir.

We are now on the holiday part of our visit and I write
this crouching in a tent beside a candle with the roar of a
Himalayan torrent behind me and the trilling of thousands of
crickets all around, drowning out the sound of the porters
cleaning up after dinner. The trek 'Sidar" has just come to
the tent with water bottles filled with boiled water for to-
morrow's hike of about 12 miles up a deep gorge leading towards
the Moontack you see on the stamp. (A snow-covered Himalayan
peak)

I shall mail this at a village at the south end of the
gorge and it will be carried on foot by a bare-footed mailman
carrying a pole with 3 bells on it. From Pikhara it goes by air
(hopefully) or local bus (more likely) to Katmandu and thence
via Delhi to Canada.

We have been walking for four days now between Manaslu and
Annapurna and the great snow covered range between them. The
country is spectacularly beautiful verdant valleys of paddy with
jungle covered slopes rising up on each side and great mountain
torrents pouring down from the peaks. The people are friendly
but live very basic lives and short ones - the expectancy here
is about 40. I cannot cease to wonder at the loads they carry
up and down these slopes. Each of our porters bears 3 of our
kit bags totalling about 60 pounds for eight hours, much of it
in temperatures of 85-90 degrees F, as we are still quite low.
In ten to twelve days we shall climb the pass on the N.E. side
of Annapurna almost 18,000 feet up. Then it will be decidedly
cooler!

The bird life is very rich here but there is little time
to stop and look at this stage. Even more impressive are the
numbers and varieties of butterflies and other insects - praying
mantis, large beetles, etc. Higher up we shall have free or

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