The Foreign Service Journal, December 2004

team. Villagers greeted us festively. Because the vaccine would remain viable only by pass- ing it from person to person through their sites of inocu- lation, or pustules, we recruited boys willing to be inocu- lated and become part of our team. A villager would pass through the line and bare his arm for a staff member to sterilize a spot. Another worker would take a ball of clean, white string and hold a length between his hands, touch the middle of the string to the pustule of the boy and then apply that piece of string to the villager’s arm. A third worker would then prick the spot where the string touched to allow the inocula to penetrate the skin. We could successfully immunize several hundred people in a few hours, and we continued using this strategy in village after village. Our 1952-1953 effort was a significant start to the control of smallpox in Nepal. Learning Experiences in Sherpaland If in the southern lowlands of the Terai we faced dan- gers from heat, unclean water, bandits, leopards, tigers and poisonous snakes, our treks into the hills presented other challenges. There, monsoon rains make for slip- pery crags and leech infestations. The latter, segmented worms about two inches long, could penetrate the eyelets of our shoes by lengthening their body to squeeze through. The Gurkhas used their kukri — the trademark 18-inch knife with a curved blade — to flick them off before we even noticed them. They also used the kukri to clear trails through dense bamboo and brush as we climbed the Himalayas to Sherpaland, villages at alti- tudes over 16,000 feet near the Tibetan border. The Sherpa villagers had never seen Westerners, we were told, and had been visited by someone from Kathmandu only twice before, when the maharaja’s sol- diers appropriated women for his harem and again when zamindars, or landlords, attempted to collect taxes. As we neared the village, our coolies became increasingly apprehensive. Dogs began barking. We entered the vil- lage and a man appeared from behind a house, then another, until several men, all armed, confronted us. F O C U S D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 45