OVERDUE AID FOR NEPAL
Ramaya pleads for food Wednesday after an aid helicopter lands at Gumda, a mountain village near the epicentre of Saturday’s massive earthquake in Nepal. It was the first relief since the quake.
Q How does it feel to be home?
A We’re still in a state of shock. We were all talking about the fact that at different airports on the way home, we would hear a cart go by, and we would jump.
Because the aftershocks had been so unrelenting — there were three that were full-blown earthquakes. I’m so happy to be home, but I’m also so sad about the people in Nepal who still haven’t received aid. The people of that country need our help. Nepal is already vulnerable and the infrastructure is precarious. And now with this, it’s just complete devastation.
Q Can you describe where you were when the earthquake happened?
A I was in the car with four other teammates and we were heading to a sacred site. We thought there was a car accident because we didn’t actually feel the earthquake to the same degree as the people standing on the street. We were shielded from that.
But then we saw people fall off motorcycles. We saw a building come down, dust and wires, and we thought — this is more than a car accident.
We felt that we had to get back to the hotel, to make sure that our other teammates were OK. We were 22 people spread over Kathmandu and we all made it safely back to the hotel.
Our hotel didn’t sustain a great degree of damage; it held up very well. But during the second quake there was this huge, heavy bell — and it started to sway back and forth — the ground was vibrating.
I thought we were going to be swallowed up. It was terrifying.
Q Can you tell me a little about what you were doing over there?
A The Dream Mountains foundation raises money for seven different charities. The whole objective is to take people on these incredible climbs and to create some fabulous fundraising for charities. Interestingly, two of those charities are on the ground in Nepal. One of those is SOS Children’s Villages, but the main one that’s been called to aid right now is CARE Canada.
Q You hadn’t yet started your climb when this happened. Is that right?
A We didn’t know until later what happened at Mount Everest. We were headed to base camp when the quake happened. The climb was supposed to be an eight-day climb. But once we knew what was going on throughout the country there was just no way that anyone could, or would, proceed.
In the hotel, I was chatting and meeting with injured climbers who came down from base camp. There was one fellow with this huge black eye and he had been in the avalanche. We met people from all over the world. Members of our team gave some of our supplies to climbers who had come down from the mountain.
Q What are the evacuations like, how did you get out?
A Guardian angels. Honestly, we were very lucky to get out how we did. Our travel agent from CAA, Heather Stewart, was working around the clock from this end. And a team member on the ground had a connection that found a routing. There was a lot of magic happening to get us home.
We left Kathmandu, and went from Kathmandu to Doha, and from Doha to Frankfurt, and now we’re finally here.
Q What do you think Canadians should know about what’s happening in Nepal?
A For the people of Nepal this is
so foreign because there hasn’t been an earthquake like this in a long time. The newer buildings are built to standards, but it’s the old buildings and monuments that are gone.
They are people of such profound faith and it is so difficult for them to lose their symbols and temples. The fact that people were even coming to work to try and make life normal for other people is amazing. There are so many stresses on the population.
I spoke to one fellow and he told me that there was a shortage of wood. And it is very important to people of the Hindu faith to burn the bodies quickly for the purposes of reincarnation.
Q Lots of people over there are without food, shelter and relief. What was the situation like when you left?
A I visited the Ten Villages where people are camping because they’re scared to return to their homes. They’re staying there because they live in high buildings and they’re afraid that those are going to topple in an aftershock. Everyone is so on edge. They’re all camped out, in open spaces — just in a state of complete limbo and uncertainty.
Hands pressed together in supplication, the Nepalese women pleaded for food, shelter and anything else the helicopter might have brought Wednesday to this smashed mountain village near the epicentre of last weekend’s earthquake, which killed more than 5,000 people.
Unlike in Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, where most buildings were spared complete collapse, the tiny hamlets clinging to the remote mountainsides of Gorkha District have been ravaged.
Entire clusters of homes were reduced to piles of stone and splintered wood. Orange plastic tarps used for shelter now dot the cliffsides and terraced rice paddies carved into the land.
“We are hungry,” cried a woman, who gave her name only as Deumaya, gesturing toward her stomach and opening her mouth to emphasize her desperation. Another woman, Ramayana, her eyes hollow and haunted, repeated the plea: “Hungry! We are hungry!”
But food is not the only necessity in short supply out here beyond the reaches of paved roads, electricity poles and other benefits of the modern world. These days, even water is scarce.
Gumda is one of a handful of villages identified as the worst hit by Saturday’s 7.8-magnitude earthquake, from which it will almost certainly take years to recover.
As in many villages, though, the death toll in Gumda was far lower than feared, since many villagers were working outdoors when the quake struck at midday. Of Gumda’s 1,300 residents, five were killed in the quake and 20 more were injured.
As the helicopter landed Wednesday with 40-kilogram sacks of rice, wind and rain whipped across the crest of the mountain. Seeing the conditions, the UN World Food Program’s Geoff Pinnock shouted over the roar of the propellers, “the next shipment has to be plastic sheets. These people need shelter more than they need food.”
With eight million Nepalese affected by the earthquake, including 1.4 million needing immediate food assistance, Pinnock said the relief effort would stretch on for months.
Nepalese police said Wednesday the death toll from the quake had reached 5,045. Another 19 were killed on the slopes of Mount Everest, while 61 died in neighbouring India, and China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported 25 dead in Tibet.
The disaster also injured more than 10,000, police said, and rendered thousands more homeless.
Planes carrying food and other supplies have been steadily arriving at Kathmandu’s small airport, but the aid distribution process remains fairly chaotic. About 200 people blocked traffic in the capital Wednesday to protest the slow pace of aid delivery.
Police have arrested dozens of people on suspicion of looting abandoned homes as well as causing panic by spreading rumours of another big quake.
In some heartening news, French rescuers freed a man from the ruins of a three-storey Kathmandu hotel more than three days after the quake. Rishi Khanal, 27, said he drank his own urine to survive.
But food is not the only necessity in short supply out here. These days, even water is scarce.