Yoga instructor trapped in Nepal pleads for help
CALGARY — A Calgary yoga instructor has contacted her family from a remote area near Nepal’s Langtang region, panicked, sobbing and desperate for help.
“She is stranded, she is trapped, and she is begging and pleading for help. She needs immediate rescue and aid,” said Tamara McLeod’s sister, Michelle Dack. “She has limited food, some rice, some water, but it’s really cold. When she first called us she was in a panic, crying, literally bawling her eyes out.”
McLeod’s family has been racked with worry since the Nepalese earthquake, with a death toll that is expected to surpass 10,000, hit the area where McLeod was travelling, followed by aftershocks and a massive avalanche and landslides.
Now McLeod is trapped amid rubble with four other people including a Nepalese guide and tourists from Europe, with no power, very little food and it’s unclear what kind of shelter they have sought.
“I am trying to call her back but I haven’t been able to connect.”
Dack says the family has received little help from Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department. There is great concern that only a dozen helicopters are flying throughout the country to rescue victims of the earthquake and avalanches, she said.
“We need our government to negotiate with the Nepalese to go in and rescue them.
“Everything around her is completely collapsed, and it’s very, very cold. I’m not sure if they have a tent or whether they’ve found shelter under a roof.”
McLeod, 24, has been living in India over the past six months studying yoga. For the past few weeks, she has been spending time in Nepal teaching yoga workshops, said Dack.
McLeod is among 10 Canadians with roots in Calgary who had been reported missing.
Members of the Calgary Nepalese Community Association are also worried about relatives in the region, with some fearing they have lost family deep in the rubble.
“There have been so many casualties, in my neighbourhood, all the buildings have collapsed,” said Rishi Bastakoti of the Calgary Nepalese Community Association, whose parents and in-laws are safe.
“My mother is slightly injured. The fence fell on her when she was working in the garden during the earthquake. But she will be OK. There are others with much worse situations.”
Bastakoti says of the 4,000 or so members of the Calgary Nepalese Community, dozens are not sure of their family’s whereabouts, and one believes some family members may have died in a building collapse.
The Calgary Nepalese Community Association is also planning a candlelight vigil Friday at City Hall in memory of the victims.
Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for Foreign Affairs said Tuesday that Canadian consular officers in Nepal and India, assisted by the Emergency Watch and Response Centre in Ottawa, are providing consular assistance around the clock. In other developments Tuesday:
❚ Officials and foreign aid workers who have rushed to Nepal following the magnitude-7.8 earthquake are struggling against stormy weather, poor roads and a shortage of manpower and funds to get assistance to the needy. On Tuesday, the district managed to co-ordinate 26 helicopter trips to remote villages to evacuate 30 injured people before a major downpour halted the effort.
“We need 15,000 plastic tarps alone. We cannot buy that number,” said Mohan Pokhran, a district disaster management committee member. Only 50 volunteer army and police officers are distributing food and aid for thousands in the immediate vicinity, he said.
“We don’t have nearly enough of anything,” Pokhran said.
❚ On Tuesday came more tragedy: A mudslide and avalanche struck near the village of Ghodatabela and 250 people were feared missing, district official Gautam Rimal said. Heavy snow had been falling, and the ground may have been loosened by the quake.
❚ But there also was also some heartening news: French rescuers freed a man from the ruins of a three-storey Kathmandu hotel, near the main bus station. The man, identified as Rishi Khanal, was conscious and taken to a hospital; no other information about him was released.