Review by Broughton Coburn, WorldView Fall-Winter 2025-2026

In Nepal, remarkable coincidences are part of Himalayan legend. So perhaps it’s not implausible that four spirited souls with a unique blend of professional backgrounds could arrive from North America, converge in an impossibly remote village, and launch a dream of designing and operating a comprehensive rural community health and development project.

The inspiring and dramatic events in Far from the Road unfolded a half century ago in the verdant, idyllic valley of Dhorpatan, at 9,000 feet elevation southwest of the Dhaulagiri range of high mountains. Ross Anthony, from Oklahoma City, a former agricultural volunteer and then PhD economics student, conceived the project alongside Nepal’s first NGO, Paropakar. With passion and persistence, “Ross the Boss” cobbled together shoestring-level funding from a grassroots development agency called World Neighbors, in time to sign up returned PCV 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 returned PCV 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 300-plus Tibetans who had been re-settled in a nearby refugee camp. The team all spoke Nepali, and some Tibetan, but were greatly assisted by Chope Paljor Tsering, the designated “Camp-in-Charge” and Pema Gyaltsen, the camp’s sole resident with medical experience.

Medical equipment was scarce and rudimentary. They jury-rigged an anesthesia device, sterilized instruments in a Chinese pressure cooker, cranked a hand-powered centrifuge, and fashioned a hurricane lamp from an enamel plate, glass shards, and bicycle spokes. 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 conducted an immunization campaign. Mary and Steve assisted women in childbirth, and Mary developed a community health worker training program, and conducted sessions in maternal and child health.

They also treated cases of leprosy, tuberculosis, and STIs, and organized a cataract removal camp—granting eyesight to patients who had long been blind. With a microscope, they identified pathogens in sputum and stool samples—in a diagnostic process that villagers remarked must be akin to the divinations of shamans and lamas. Drugs and supplies were flown in from Kathmandu by the intrepid Swiss bush pilot, Emil Wick, who buzzed the landing field before circling back around to clear it of yaks and cows.

The clinic was soon crowded with Nepali and Tibetan patients, and livestock brought in for veterinary care. All the while, Mike worked with local carpenters and masons to build a new hospital building and expand the existing gravity-flow drinking water system.

“We had very little stuff,” Stephen said, “but we did not want for more. Having a purpose provided what we needed.”

As the team grew together, professionally and personally, they found that simply delivering curative medical care wasn’t enough. They found that other health-related variables such as nutrition, water quality, sanitation, education, and improvements in agriculture and economic livelihoods were key to positive community health outcomes. At the same time, they appreciated the important psycho-therapeutic, social and religious functions of the lamas and shamans, and came to understand that, even in some life-or-death situations, villagers often didn’t have the money or the time to spend away from their crops and livestock to travel to a distant hospital for advanced care. 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—due to circumstances outside their control. The police presence in Dhorpatan grew, and the team detected a mood shift, as if the entire community was being surveilled.

“We wondered what this was about,” Mary writes. “Was it to monitor the activities of the Tibetan refugees? Nepali traders? Local hunters or poachers…? We never thought it might be us.”

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.

The Dhorpatan camp was located uncomfortably close to the border with Tibet, and when China had occupied Tibet 15 years earlier, refugees escaped into Nepal. In a clandestine operation, the CIA provided support to some Nepal-based Tibetan resistance fighters who were assigned the quixotic mission of staging raids and gathering intelligence against China. In 1975, that mission imploded as Nepal pivoted, hoping to gain favor with much-larger China.

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. An appendix with Mike’s designs for the water systems and clinic stand as a testament to what can be done with locally available materials and a lot of ingenuity.

Ross, who spent his spare time in Dhorpatan distributing seeds and planting orchards and vegetable gardens with local farmers, concluded that helping people meet their aspirations is not easy. “It requires cultural and political sensitivity, community understanding, a good project plan, a dedicated team, respect for local customs and beliefs, ingenuity, research, an awareness of the limitations of Western technology, a little luck, and a large dose of humility and willingness to change.”

Today, as the U.S. government scales back its international investments, projects by individuals and organizations such as the Peace Corps play a crucial role in providing local assistance and forging connections across the globe. Far from the Road illuminates how generosity, motivation and good will can indeed change lives.

—Broughton Coburn (Nepal, 1973-75) of Wilson, Wyoming, is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Colorado College, and has worked on conservation and development projects in Nepal and South Asia for two of the past five decades. He has written for Worldview magazine and has authored or edited nine books, including two New York Times bestsellers.