Blood groups

‘Anna Ma’am! Anna Ma’am! What blood group are you?’ the children in Class 5 ask me. They have all had their blood tested this week. I am O negative - common as muck in the UK, but not here in Nepal apparently. The most common blood group in Nepal, the children tell me, is AB and the least common is O. I try to remember back to my school days and whether I learnt that blood groups are different in Asia from Europe...are they? I'm not sure, so I do my research the modern way and post a question to my FaceBook profile page and await the answer.

School has finished. The bell has been rung – or rather a hammer has been struck several times on a piece of metal – and I duck as I leave through the low gate (low for me, a tall Western woman) that leads to the narrow, shaded, alley of shops and activity outside. At the end of this alley, wide enough for motorbikes and slender cars, is the busy and dusty ring road in an area called ‘BusPark’ (it does exactly what it says on the tin – this area is the new bus park of Kathmandu). It’s busy, noisy and dirty. I wait here on the dusty roadside amidst piles of rubbish, temporary clothes stands and food stands (wooden tables knocked together from scraps of wood). Sometimes I think that Kathmandu is one enormous garbage can and litter lies everywhere around me. The Bishnumati River is, literally, chocked with plastic bottles. I wait surrounded by other people making their way home after work and watch as school children weave their way across the road with ease between the buses, trucks, cars and ubiquitous motorbikes that simultaneously weave their way along the road perpendicular to the children.

There’s a cacophony of horns, buses spewing diesel, car engines and motorbikes, emergency vehicles, and voices. Hanging from the door of each bus is a boy who calls the route to passersby. Although the routes are numbered, the buses don’t display the number, and any writing is in Nepali, so I am limited to listening to the boys’ shouts for ‘Chabil! Chabil! Boudha! Boudha! Jurpati!’ Across the road I watch a traffic policeman, tall and dressed in navy blue, wander about with a whistle in his mouth. No one is taking any notice of him. My bus arrives. It is a minibus that is already full, but there’s always room for one more, and a man stands crouching to give up his seat for me. I thank him, readjust my face mask against the dusty road, get out my MP3 player and plug myself into Chopin’s Nocturne in E Flat Major for the bumpy ride home.