Kalangama Hamala ( Jumla; A Nurse’s Story)

Experience is a subjective approach of incidents that take place in our life and its impact on our future. We see the things happening. We judge them. We construct a truth on the basis of our judgement which is purely subjective because we use the tools from what we’ve learnt from the past.
Khalangama Hamala is an example of writer's experience with the people who live in a remote part of Nepal struggling with hunger, disease and untimely deaths. This is also a war narrative in the form of memoir.
Radha Paudel, a daughter of a middle class family, a nurse, a government officer, a friend of those who are in need of her support.
Her father is a mentor for her career who sow a seed of compassion and generosity in the work of humanity when she was a child. He told her that there were people who lived a life of extreme poverty than  them. As she grew up and educated as a nurse, she started her career as a nurse in Bharatpur hospital where she saw the extreme cases of three different female patients; a seven year old girl who was raped, a woman who died not getting the medical attention on time while giving birth of child , and third one was an elderly woman who survived a terrible womb operation. These three critical cases in the town like Bharatpur, reminded how the people in Humla and Jumla were surviving the epidemics where they had no access to the minimum medical facility.
Later she got chance to work as a District Coordinator of Safe Motherhood Program in Jumla, experienced the hindrance, survived the brutal attack of Maoist rebels in the district headquarter Khalanga bazar, Jumla. Despite all the hindrances and challenges,  she was able to bring the reforms in health sector working closely with the local people. She won woman peacemaker 2012 from the University of San Diego  and  peace award 2012 from UNDP.
In this book she has recorded the vivid nightmare of the Maoist attack at Khalanga and loss of lives. She is not politically biased while pouring her thrilling experience in the words. The scene she brought up in and around the Tila river in post war period reads like a 19th century Gothic tales.
Khalangama Hamala is one of the bricks of  the war literature in the form of memoir and history.
Paudel was awarded nationally and internationally for her social work. The book won the Madan Puruskar in 2013.
The English edition of this book is entitled Jumla; a Nurse’s Story.