Ever wonder about people you’ve met years ago, whose lives briefly crossed your path in some small way? Where are they now? Who have they become?
Back in 1964, when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal, my Peace Corps partner and I spent five months vaccinating children in the Himalayan hills in and around the tiny village of Kunchha. By the end of the program, we had immunized nearly 25,000 youngsters, many of whom I photographed while they waited their turn in line.
One morning, I snapped the photo of a boy (with his mother) who was watching pensively as we set up the immunization camp. He stood out from most others, tall for his age and clad in a torn shirt and loincloth, as young village boys from poor families in the hills dressed back then.
One day several decades later, I happened to meet a well-dressed gentleman in Kathmandu, the capital city, who in the course of a short conversation told me he was a doctor, and that he had been raised near Kunchha. I judged him to be about the right age to have been one of the children we immunized. When I asked, he said yes, he remembered his mother taking him there to be vaccinated.
He was surprised when I told him that I had probably made the vaccination scar that he showed me on his forearm.
I didn’t get his name and we never met again, but I remembered my photo of the boy, who looked strikingly like him. Though I have never confirmed it, I am reasonably sure that he was that boy.
What became of some of the other children we vaccinated that year? How many went on to become doctors or other professionals, or remained in the villages to teach school, or to farm the land of their forefathers? And after so many years, do any of them remember when our lives crossed in Kunchha?
I found out one afternoon in 1985 while overnighting in Dhangadhi, a town in Nepal’s far western lowlands near the India border. I was on a rural development consultancy, and it was the first time I’d been there. After an early supper in an open-air eatery along Dhangadhi’s bustling main street, my companion and I sought out a better place for tomorrow’s breakfast, away from the honking horns, exhaust fumes and dust.
A restaurant down the road looked promising, but upon entering we saw that it was more of a bistro than a diner. It was the kind of place where men come to drink, eat meaty snacks and talk the evening away. But it was far too early for that, and the place was empty except for the owner in the kitchen preparing refreshments for the late night crowd.
When he looked up and saw me, he exclaimed: “Mr. Don! You’ve come.”
I was astonished. I had never been in Dhangadhi before, so how did he know my name? Who was he?
“I’m Narayan,” he said. But because Narayan is a common Nepali boy’s name, and seeing that I was still perplexed, he added, “I am the mischievous schoolboy whom you knew when you lived in Kunchha.” As Kunchha was more than 200 miles away up in the hills, and that was two decades earlier, I had to refocus my thoughts.
Then I remembered a young Narayan who had been involved in some sort of misbehavior over exam papers at the school. The locals had considered whatever he’d done scandalous. He was also one of the thousands of children whom we had vaccinated. And now here he was, older and wiser, the proprietor of a business far from his childhood home. We chatted and laughed about where life sometimes takes us, and next morning, at his invitation, we returned for omelets with tea and toast.
Not long after that, I met yet another child of Kunchha, grown up and married, with children of her own. My son Hans and I had stopped for tea and snack in a tiny roadside village in the hills near Kunchha, which I hadn’t visited in many years. We selected a teashop at random and placed our order. When it came, the proprietress addressed me as “Mr. Don.”
I had no idea who she was, but she remembered me as one of the Peace Corps volunteers for whom her mother sometimes cooked meals in Kunchha. “I was only 3 or 4 years old then, and you read picture books to me,” she said. “Don’t you remember? I was the little sister to Narayan, the boy who got into trouble at the school.”
Small world.
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