Expats try phones, social apps to contact kin

Power outages and communication problems have made life agonising for millions

After the earthquake hit Nepal, Prem Raja Mahat spent a sleepless night at his Baltimore home, trying again and again to reach his son, who was visiting friends and family back in Mahat’s home country.

“My wife was crying, crying so much, ‘My son is not here, keep calling, keep calling.’ All night I called, but I could not get through,” he said. “I could not work. I could not sleep. Everyone felt so bad.”

Power outages and communications problems have made life agonising for the nearly 6 million Nepalese who live abroad — or about 22 per cent of the population. They try desperately to reach loved ones through cell phones and global messaging apps, only to be met with silence or fleeting connections. They’re forced to wait for word to slowly trickle out of the impoverished country of 28 million whose communications have been shaken back to a different era.

The lucky ones received a quick call or text or an early posting on Facebook. But even they have had plenty of time to wait and wonder, as they viewed the devastation on TV and social media, how their loved ones were holding up, what they needed and when they might hear from them again.

Mahat is known to millions in Nepal as the “King of Folk Music”, though he has run restaurants in Baltimore for years. He said yesterday in a phone interview that his son finally managed to reach him after he borrowed a charged phone.

“He is in a tent, staying outside of the home, under the skies,” Mahat said.

Damodar Gautam, a chef at Durga, a Nepalese restaurant in downtown Seoul, said he hadn’t been able to talk on the phone with his family, but he managed to connect right after the news broke via Facebook and Viber, a messaging app. Gautam, who has been in Seoul for three years, said there were some injuries but mostly everyone is OK.

K.P. Sitoula, who runs a restaurant in Seoul, says his family members in Nepal made it through in good condition because they live in a part of Kathmandu near the airport that has escaped much of the devastation the rest of the capital has seen.