Far from the Road: A Community Health Project in the Himalayas

By Mary Murphy | PCV in Nepal 1971–73; C. Ross Anthony | Nepal 1968–70; Stephen Bezruchka | Nepal 1971–74; and Michael Payne | Nepal 1971–74, Peace Corps Writers, 2025

The inspiring and dramatic events in Far from the Road unfolded half a century ago in the verdant, idyllic valley of Dhorpatan, at 9,000 feet elevation in Nepal. Ross Anthony, from Oklahoma City, a returned agricultural Volunteer, conceived the project alongside Nepal’s first NGO, Paropakar. With passion and persistence, “Ross the Boss” cobbled together shoestring-level funding and signed up Mary Murphy, a community health educator from suburban Washington, D.C. They recruited Stephen Bezruchka, a Stanford Medical School grad from Toronto, and were later joined by Mike Payne, a water systems engineer from Cleveland, Ohio. 

With ponies and porters, the team hiked for a week to reach a Nepalese community that included more than 300 Tibetans who had been resettled in a nearby refugee camp. Medical equipment was scarce and rudimentary, so they jury-rigged an anesthesia device, sterilized instruments in a Chinese pressure cooker, and cranked a hand-powered centrifuge. 

Buoyed along mostly by high spirits, they dove into treating wounds, burns, and unhealed fractures, provided medicine for near-universal coughs and stomach ailments, and organized a cataract-removal camp—granting eyesight to patients who had long been blind. The team was committed to dispensing care equally to all, while recognizing that this may have challenged long-standing hierarchies in the village. 

Their extraordinary efforts would not be long-lived, however. Tensions with the police increased as the team unwittingly became tangled in a volatile web of bureaucracy and geopolitics. Local team member Pema Gyaltsen is abruptly arrested and incarcerated in a refugee camp near Pokhara. Soon after, the four Westerners are recalled to Kathmandu and notified that their project had been shut down and their visas will not be renewed. 

This informative book closes with a poignant update on where the team and their colleagues are now, and a good-news, bad-news look at Dhorpatan as it enters the modern connected world economy. Today, as the U.S. government scales back its international investments, it is a reminder of the real-world impact the Peace Corps plays across the globe.