On a foggy Kathmandu morning on 2 December, a disparate group of Nepalis got into two long-distance buses. There were 70 in all, among them well-known doctors, policy-makers and heads of public health organisations, but more than 40 were straight from the villages, where they worked as village health workers, midwives and non-governmental organisers. They were all headed for Bangladesh, to the People's Health Assembly, which was taking place at a village outside Dhaka 4-8 December.
There were a couple of things unconventional about this Nepali delegation. The participants were all going by bus, not a surprising thing to do given the costs involved. But by and large, the participants to South Asian meets and junkets go by air, which always more than doubles the costs of getting participants together. The Nepali organisers hit upon a not entirely novel, but certainly largely untried, idea of going by bus. This meant that the very nature of the group could also better reflect the public health fraternity of Nepal in its diversity.
The participants were prepared for a difficult trip that would cover 1400 km, traversing the length of Nepal, cutting through the 'Chicken's Neck' section of India near Siliguri, and heading down through North Bangladesh to Dhaka, across the Jamuna.
After a full day of driving through the Nepali hills and Tarai, we reached Nepal's eastern border at Kakarbhitta at 8 in the evening. Starting early the next day, passing through Naxalbari, Siliguri and Jalpaiguri, we arrived at noon in Chyangrabanda on the Indo-Bangla border, guarded on this side by the Border Security Force. The BSF jawans kept us there for hours, asking questions about our mission and destination. It turned out that they had a letter from some government secret service agency alerting them to an ISI agent named 'Yuvaraj' with a forged Nepali passport with us in the bus. They let us through after they were convinced that the one Yuvaraj in our group was who he said he was.