Living History Unknown (best books to read fiction .txt) 📖

We took extraordinary precautions, since we were only halfway through our trip and even one sick day would throw off the rest of our schedule. Our hosts went out of their way to accommodate our concerns. “Mom, you won’t believe what the Secret Service agents told me,” said a startled Chelsea our first day. “They said the hotel pool was drained before we arrived, and they refilled it with bottled water!” I never learned if this was true, but it would not have surprised me.

During a courtesy visit to the royal palace, I was received by King Birendra Bit Bikram Shah Dev and Queen Aishwarya in a room with a huge tiger pelt on the floor. The Queen had met me upon my arrival at the airport and told me she looked forward to talking with me. I hoped I would have a chance to discuss health care and girls’ education with her, but the King did all the talking. Until recently, he had reigned over a kingdom essentially sealed from the outside world. Now the country was undergoing a transition to representative government, and he wanted to discuss potential American aid and investment.

Nepal was also facing violence and unrest from Maoist guerrillas in the countryside.

That, however, turned out to be less of a threat to the royal family than a pathology within the palace. It is still difficult to accept the fate of the King and Queen and eight family members, shot dead in that very palace a few years later. Their assassin, according to official reports, was the Crown Prince, who was enraged because he was not allowed to marry for love.

Early the next morning, Chelsea and I went for a long walk in the hills above the city.

People stood on the roadside to watch us pass by, and one bright-eyed girl, about ten or eleven, joined us. She spoke a smattering of English, mostly names of places, like “New York City” or “California,” which she would punctuate with an adjective like “big” or “happy.” Then she nodded or laughed as though we were friends having a long conversation.

She completely won me over. The higher we walked, the more I saw how every square inch of land was used for something―houses, terraced farming, roads or Buddhist monasteries that dotted the hillsides. I heard the tinkling of bells from the monastery nearest to us and saw white prayer banners waving from its ramparts. When we walked back down to our cars, the girl’s father was waiting. By then, I had learned that she didn’t attend school but had picked up her bits of English by attaching herself to tourists and trekkers. I complimented the father on his daughter’s intelligence and curiosity, but I doubt I communicated effectively. Though I knew that money was an inadequate token of gratitude and concern, I wanted her father to recognize that I valued his daughter. I hoped that her work ethic and resourcefulness might raise her stature in her family, and encourage them to consider different life choices for her. I have often wondered what became of her.

Later that morning, we visited a women’s health clinic founded by American women living in Nepal. Nepal had one of the world’s highest maternal and infant death rates-a staggering 830 maternal deaths for every 100,000 births, compared with the world average of 400 and the American average of less than seven. The clinics, a partnership among USAID, Save the Children and the Nepalese government, employed a commonsense, low-tech approach to preventive care and had established a program to provide pregnant women and midwives with “safe home delivery kits.” The kits contained a plastic sheet, a bar of soap, a piece of twine, wax and a razor blade. In Nepal, a plastic sheet for a woman in labor to lie on, soap for the midwife to clean her hands and utensils, string to tie off the umbilical cord and a clean razor blade to cut it can make the difference between life and death to a mother and her newborn.

On a stopover in the Royal Chitwan National Park in southern Nepal, Chelsea and I rode an elephant. To be honest, if I hadn’t known I was going to be photographed for posterity, I would have just put on a pair of jeans. Instead, I was garbed in a kind of Out of Africa look, with a khaki shirt and skirt and straw hat. The picture of Chelsea and me that flashed around the world showed a happy mother-daughter team perched on our pachyderm and watching a rare Asian rhino. Later, when we got back to Washington, James Carville remarked: “Don’t you just love it? You spent two years trying to get people better health care and they tried to kill you. You and Chelsea rode an elephant, and they loved you!”

Bangladesh, the most densely populated country on earth, presented the starkest contrast of wealth and poverty I saw in South Asia. Looking out the window from our hotel room in Dhaka, I could see a wooden fence that ran between shanties and garbage heaps on one side and the swimming pool and cabanas where visitors like me could enjoy a drink and a swim on the other. It was like looking at a stereopticon of the global economy.

Here, the authorities made no effort to hide the destitute behind brightly colored cloth. The city was wall-to-wall people, more people per square foot than I had ever seen anywhere, all moving in small cars that clogged the roads or in huge crowds that spilled into those roads. More than once, I gasped as a car narrowly skimmed a group of people.

Walking outside in the heat and humidity was like stepping into a steam sauna. But this was another country I had long wanted to visit, because it was home to two internationally recognized projects-the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research (ICDDR/B) in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and the Grameen Bank, a pioneer of microcredit. The ICDDR/B is