I have a new place to put on my list of where I want to go someday: Nepal. I recently started reading the book Little Princes, about a guy who works with children who are victims of child trafficking after Nepal's civil war. It's such a good book and I highly recommend it, although I haven't finished it yet. Nepal just sounds like the Bolivia of Asia--the mountains, the people, the poverty. One paragraph made me laugh because it easily could have been written about Bolivia (or any Third World country, probably):
"There are no destinations written on the front of local Kathmandu buses. One learns the route from the ten-year-old boy leaning out the open side door as the bus speeds along, looking for passengers, barking the final destination. Often the bus does not even come to a full stop. You are meant to run alongside it, grab a metal bar, swing onboard, then quickly cram your way into the horde of humanity already aboard. If it's too crowded, you simply cling to the outside and hope cars don't pass too closely. Sometimes an old lady would be waiting by the side of the road, as there are few official bus stops, and the boy would pound the side to indicate that the driver should slow enough to give the woman a fighting chance to swing herself aboard with the help of the boy."
Its interesting to me that people in poverty, no matter where they are on the globe, tend to end up doing a lot of the same things, like cramming on to buses with a little boy yelling the destination out the window and only stopping for old ladies.
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