Nepal towns wait desperately for aid
Villagers rely only on themselves to find the missing or treat the injured, with no help from the capital
SANGACHOK, Nepal — It has been four days since Prabina Shrastha’s house collapsed on her best friend and her best friend’s toddler son, and no one has cleared the rubble to account for the bodies that undoubtedly lie beneath.
Police Officer Sagar Tamang, 33, a broad-chested, gregarious man who is the head constable of the Sangachok police, believes five or more bodies may be trapped under the house, which was close to street merchants’ stalls and across from a field used by farmers.
“I have helped where I can,” Tamang said Wednesday of the effort to clear debris in his village. “But no one from the government has come to help us here yet, and I am hoping that that will change soon.”
The tragic story of Sangachok is mirrored in the experience of many small villages in the surrounding district of Sindhupalchowk, where otherwise picturesque green hillsides are pocked with wreckage wrought by the magnitude 7.8 earthquake that struck Nepal on Saturday. Although international aid has flowed into the capital, Katmandu, little of it appears to have made it to outlying areas of this largely rural country.
For Shrastha, 25, the wait has been agonizing. She and her friend, Sanu Shrastha (no relation), were in an alley that ran between their homes when the earthquake struck. Sanu Shrastha was carrying 18-month-old Shreeman on her shoulder. Prabina Shrastha was thrown forward into the street. Sanu Shrastha and Shreeman were left behind as the brick houses fell.
“I never saw Sanu or her child again,” Prabina Shrastha said. “Everything went completely silent.”
Sangachok residents complain that no one has come to help with their rescue efforts or help account for the missing and dead. Clean water is scarce, people are hungry, and the many injured still have not received adequate medical treatment.
Among the wounded is Samir Giri, 7, a wiry boy with thin wisps of hair that fall like little black feathers against his brown forehead. On Saturday, Samir was attempting to race across a road to a field where his mother was working when falling bricks struck him in the head, slamming him into the rubble, unconscious.
His mother, Rama Giri, a 32-year-old farmer, ran to Samir, the youngest of her three children, and lifted him from the debris. Then she waited with him in her arms until the next day, when an ambulance was able to take him to Dhulikhel Hospital, the nearest major medical center, about 25 miles away.
Giri was told that Samir needed a CT scan, but for several days the hospital lacked power to run one. Samir still wears the head bandage applied Sunday morning, now stained with dirt from sleeping outdoors in a makeshift tent community on the outskirts of Sangachok. He has ugly scrapes on his back and buttocks from the fall.
Since Saturday the hospital has received more than 950 patients and conducted 85 major operations.
“Luckily, the hospital wasn’t damaged, and we have been able to provide all the essential services from Day 1, despite the three-day power cut,” said Rajiv Shrestha, a doctor at the hospital.
But with patients overflowing in emergency and post-operation units, even this efficient community hospital is worried about how it can provide quality service to earthquake victims. “We have a sufficient number of doctors and paramedics but are running out of stock of essential medicines, surgical materials and … beds and blankets,” Shrestha said.
Back in Sangachok, the Giri family home was rendered unlivable by the quake. Walking downstairs to the bed where Rama Giri and her children once slept is now almost impossible; the broken concrete stairs crumble and slide underfoot. Broken glass and ceramics crunch wherever anyone walks, and the back wall of the house is gone, revealing a sprawling view of mountain splendor.
“I love Sangachok because I was born in this village, and you can see how everything is so beautiful here,” Giri said, pointing through the opening toward a view of a stream rumbling through a mountain valley. “But now I have lost everything, and it will be so hard to recover.”
Giri’s husband, who works as a taxi driver in Katmandu, has been missing since the earthquake. Attempts to reach his cellphone have produced only messages saying that the number is unavailable. A family friend from Katmandu told Giri that he has searched for her husband throughout the capital with no success.
“I’m so worried about my husband,” she said. “But at least my son is still alive.”
Patience throughout the district is wearing thin. Residents of Panichaur, a village of about 3,000 where almost no structures were left intact, expressed rage Wednesday afternoon over the lack of help from the government.
Bibek Giri, 41, a high school teacher (no relation to Rama Giri), said he wanted to “burn soldiers alive” for not helping his village.
“Everyone is hungry and no one can get to food,” he said. “I heard on BBC radio about all the aid. Where is our aid?”
Officer Tamang, meanwhile, is trying to instill calm in Sangachok as his desperate residents wait for help. Tamang’s basement police station was obliterated during the quake, and he now works from a small metal stand on a road side. It’s also where he sleeps.
This has made him the butt of jokes, with several young women teasing that he’s “no longer a real constable” because he has no home or office.
Tamang takes it all in good humor.
“This is Nepal,” he said. “We’re in the middle of a tragedy and these girls find time to make fun of me.”
It is the deeper emotional bonds formed among residents in villages like Sangachok that help keep it from descending into chaos despite the lack of outside help.
When Prabina Shrastha picked herself up from the rubble after losing her friend, she limped along the main road, searching the village desperately for her son, 5-year-old Pratik.
That evening Tamang’s men found him wandering through the rubble unscathed.
“I held him so tight,” Shrastha said. “I couldn’t stop crying when I held him.”