Scores return to quake-hit Nepal to rebuild their villages and homes
BARPAK, Nepal: Dressed in his brother’s old British army fatigues, Mohan Ghale is rebuilding his mother’s home stone by stone, after retur ning to Barpak village, high in the Himalayas, which was demolished in last month’s quake.
Ghale had been working as a plumber a full day’s journey away in the Nepalese capital Kathmandu, but with his brother overseas and father away for work, it fell on his shoulders to remake the family home at the epicentre of the 7.8-magnitude quake that killed 8 633 people nationwide.
“I came back to rebuild and to help my mother. I had to,” said the 30-year old, who put off the promise of a job in Japan to return to the rubble of his childhood home.
Ghale is one of tens of thousands of his countrymen to have returned, including many of the more than 2.2 million Nepalis living abroad to help with reconstruction.
On the reopened dirt track that takes a tortuous 60km climb to Ghale’s home at 1 900m, one village after another lies in ruins in the forested mountains. In the sparsely settled Gorkha region, 440 people died in the quake.
Women are clearing debris to retrieve belongings, men are fixing makeshift iron roofs ahead of the monsoon rains, and the army is constructing a school in Barpak to replace the skeleton of a building remaining on the site of the old one.
About half-a-million homes were destroyed in Nepal by the April 25 quake and a series of aftershocks. The government has estimated reconstruction costs of $7 billion (R83bn), a third of the country’s GDP.
Nepal’s labour ministry doesn’t know how many expats have returned to the country since the quake, but the numbers going abroad to work have fallen to a daily average of 950 from 1 500 before the disaster.
In Barpak, famed for its fearless Gurkha soldiers, the head of the ar med police force’s rescue operation, Sudan Acharya, said more than 60 men had returned to help.
It is difficult to know how many are away, but in almost every family in the village, where 90 percent of the 1 200 houses were levelled, a male member was away. “This village has had a lot more help than others. Ninety percent of our work here is done.”
Back in the ruins of his mother’s home, Ghale plans to stay for three months before following millions of his countrymen into a life overseas.
“After, I will go back to lear ning Japanese in Kathmandu. I still have plans to work there,” he said. – Reuters