SHERPA BELIEFS AND WESTERN MEDICINE: PROVIDING HEALTH CARE AT KHUNDE HOSPITAL, NEPAL SUSAN HEYDON One evening, a woman was returning with some of her family members from a neighbouring village to her home in Khunde when she fell off the narrow track and was severely injured. 1 Many villagers helped res- cue her and she was carried to the hospital. It was the view of the fam- ily that the woman’s personal god, her lha, was upset and had caused hrindi, the ‘ghosts’, to push her off the trail. 2 To the doctor and staff at the Khunde Hospital the woman had stumbled and then fallen several metres down the steep mountainside. She was unconscious and had multiple unknown external and internal injuries. The family lived not far away and had used the hospital on other occasions. They said the doctor could try and treat her, but on the condition that if he thought she was going to die the family must be allowed to take her away so that she could die at home. Hospital staff had told the doctor before of the importance within Sherpa culture of dying at home. 3 For three weeks the woman remained unconscious at the hospital, but she was alive and various fractures and problems were treated. During this time the peo- ple of the villages of Khunde and Khumjung, who shared the gompa (temple) at Khumjung, were preparing for Dumje, the main festival for the wellbeing of the whole community, and which was held over sever- al days. During this festival, Khumbila, the most sacred god of Khumbu, came down from his mountain home above the hospital and village, and danced at the gompa. The woman’s husband asked if the 1 The story comes from participant observation while working as a volunteer at Khunde Hospital from 1996 to 1998. 2 Sherpa language is one of many dialects of spoken Tibetan. However, written Tibetan, which is used in religious texts, is unfamiliar to almost all lay Sherpa. There is no standard system used for phonetically rendering Sherpa words, and this has some- times led to variations of orthography. Khunde, for example, is often spelt as Kunde. 3 By speaking of ‘Sherpa’, in this chapter, I mean the Sherpa of Khumbu. Sherpa are not one homogeneous entity, since there is considerable regional and internal vari- ation amongst groups of Sherpa, such as those of Khumbu, Solu or Rolwaling, or fur- ther afield in Kathmandu or Darjeeling in India.