Happy, blessed and grateful were words repeated on Saturday at a homecoming for Rajesh Shahi, who came back to Boston recently to check on his back after so many have banded together for him over the last three decades to relieve him of a back deformity.
People in Mattapoisett, Marion and the Boston area gathered at the Quaker Friends Meeting House to welcome Shahi and celebrate his medical and personal successes in life.
Shahi, in the early 1990s, was destined for a life of poverty as a beggar with a hunchback – until a special village in Massachusetts came to the rescue.
He had a spinal curvature issue – kyphoscoliosis – that made his back resemble a turtle shell, and with no access to proper medical care in Kathmandu, Nepal.
Thanks to the community in Mattapoisett and medical staff in Boston, Shahi, now approaching 44, is a successful director of a school in Nepal, where he now pays it forward by helping children in need.
Shahi returned to the area in 2009 for a recheck. In recent years, he had been feeling back pain, so Johanna Duponte-Williams, who took Shahi into her home in the 1990s, helped to raise money for him to return to Massachusetts and have a computer tomography (CT) scan conducted on his back, which is held in place by a steel rod.
It turns out that Shahi’s back is doing well, and the back pain comes from his riding around in a scooter through the bumpy roads of Kathmandu. The medical team recommended some regular stretching exercises, and it does not appear that he will need surgery.
“It helped me to relieve myself (of fear) and go back to my family and children and school,” Shahi said on Saturday.
“Raj is really a special person. He has been put on this earth to do work for children of Kathmandu,” Duponte-Williams said.
Duponte-Williams and others raised well over $6,000 for Shahi’s return and recheck at New England Baptist Hospital.
Peter Anas, a doctor who helped lead Shahi’s medical team over the years – including his first eight-hour procedure in 1993 – was at Shahi’s celebration on Saturday.
“This is a poor boy from the street,” Anas said of Shahi when he first came to the area in the early 1990s. “Now he is an administrator at the school, and he has his kids of his own. … He is one of our most rewarding patients.”
While Shahi expressed his own gratitude, many gathered to express their own thanks of how Shahi has helped bring a piece of Nepal to Massachusetts and how he has touched so many lives here.
Peter Fortin, a former principal at Old Post Road School in Walpole, said that when Shahi returned in 2009, he spoke to several classes about his life in Nepal. Fortin said that Old Post Road School became a sister school with Shahi’s, and money was raised to support Shahi’s school.
Robin Motyka, a liaison to Shahi’s medical team, couldn’t say enough about how much Shahi touched the lives of her family and those around him in Massachusetts. Motyka’s son convinced his school to allow him in 2008 to do a project on Nepal, a country that is not often featured for that social studies capstone project.
Shahi stepped in by sending books, conducting interviews with Motyka’s son and even sending him traditional clothing. Motyka said the project raised so much awareness, and Shahi’s time here was a learning experience.
Shahi stayed in Motyka’s home during his 2009 visit and woke up in the middle of the night when he heard the crashing of a garbage truck. Motyka said that Shahi had never seen one – serving as a reminder of how poor Nepal is and how sanitation practices are substandard.
Motyka also treated Shahi to trips to Fenway Park, Gillette’s Stadium and TD Garden, where he saw an ice rink for the first time.
Shahi has always found ways to express his gratitude and spent the afternoon shaking hands, giving hugs and even reuniting with classmates that he met 30 years ago at Old Hammondtown Elementary School in Mattapoisett.
On Saturday, he helped culminate his happy homecoming with a Buddhist prayer of thanks.
By Jeffrey D. Wagner