Earthquake recovery on the roof of the world
Nepal in race against time to recover from devastating earthquake
The sun dawns on the snowy peak that pokes above the clouds, dabbling light on Mount Everest’s Hi l lary Step, the last death-defying rock wall before the summit. Below the clouds, at ground level, a collection of coloured shapes — red, yellow, blue, green, orange — spreads out like flags signalling a colourful denial of death. They are the tarpaulins that have become home to the survivors of two devastating earthquakes that convulsed Nepal on April 25 and May 12 — symbols at once of the triumphant survival and inescapable fear of recurrence. This is the aftershock. Approaching me in the park of tarpaulins and proud of the English she has learned in school, Palistha Shakya, 11, says carefully, “Where — are — you — from?”
I reply, “Canada,” and anticipate her next question will be, “Where is that?”
But I’m wrong. With wide eyes and a furrowed brow, the little girl asks, “Do you have earthquakes in Canada?”
Post-traumatic stress disorder in Nepal is at epic proportions. Like almost everyone else, Palistha and her brother, mother, father and grandmother are too afraid to sleep indoors, preferring the discomfort of crowding into a tarp tent to the palpable danger of another quake.
Today, Nepal looks like a house of cards that has collapsed: falling buildings, cracked roads, sagging electrical wires, slanting bridges.
Nearly 9,000 dead, 16,800 injured, 500,000 homes destroyed, 270,000 homes damaged. Massive landslides from the shaken earth continue to devour villages, roads and crops. Tremors as high as 6.8 on the Richter scale rattle the affected zones daily.
We travelled to Nepal with Plan International Canada to witness the damage and talk to people about how they are managing. Mattias Bryneson, the country director for Plan, says the emergency stage will last two months; the rebuilding, five years. Five weeks after the quake, they still haven’t reached some of the villages in the high mountain regions because landslides have cut off the roads. Helicopters fly in daily, dropping priority relief, food, water and tarpaulins.
The size of the task is breathtaking: narrow mountain roads reduced to one compromised lane; switchbacks with cracks that fall a foot away from the road; whitewater rivers running brown with mud from landslides.
There are 75 districts in Nepal; 30 are damaged, 14 of them critically. Of that number, two — Dolakha and Sindhupalchuk — are the worst. That’s where we travel to find remarkable stories of survival and sorrow, devastation, rebuilding, even the start of a new life amid so much death.
While Kathmandu, the capital, is horribly damaged, incredibly the city is open for business. You can identify the past by the size of the wreckage. This small pile of bricks was a fence. That bigger one was a corner store. And the huge one was an office building. The parks are full of tarpaulins that shelter people who are too afraid to go home or have no home to go to.
The old Nepal — built with sand and river stones — collapsed. The new buildings with rebar and cement mostly withstood the quake. But now there’s a race against time. The monsoon season is due to begin soon; the temporary tarpaulin shelters need to be replaced with permanent structures.
The monsoon rains may wash out the already damaged mountain roads. They’ll bring mosquitoes and, with them, malaria. The broken water system may be further compromised with flooding and create the threat of cholera. The frightened, exhausted Nepalese must hurry to get the crops in, rebuild their homes and restock their villages in case the roads become impassable during the monsoon. There is nothing easy in the months ahead. They’re bracing for the worst, and hoping for the best.
Broken houses, collapsed schools and dead parents are a pernicious troika for child trafficking. The United Nations estimates 12,000 to 15,000 girls are trafficked every year in Nepal. They mostly end up in India, but also in South Korea and South Africa.
After the quake, a cluster of humanitarian agencies joined in a daring scheme aimed at rescuing children in mid-flight. The local group, Shakti Samua, put the plan into action at bus stops in Sindhupalchuk, the district with the highest trafficking rate.
Ground Zero is this intersection of switchback roads in Bandeu, where buses and trucks come hurtling out of the mountains in a cloud of black soot on their way to Kathmandu. It’s noisy, chaotic and crowded.
The bus stop is monitored by local police and young volunteers who sit under a shelter at the side of the road with stacks of pamphlets at the ready. Everything moves at a frantic pace: a bus stops to let passengers on and off; vendors swarm like flies to the windows to sell their wares — drinks, candy, trinkets.
The vehicle is crammed with people — three to a seat — aisles packed; it’s 40 C inside and smells like a mix of vomit, urine and sweat. The volunteer has less than a minute to board the bus and deliver her message.
Archana Tamang, 19, wastes no time: “This is a bad time during the emergency; trafficking is a problem. Watch out for unaccompanied kids. If you’re suspicious call this number.”
She’s handing out pamphlets as she moves through the bus. Some passengers nod in agreement. Almost everyone listens. The driver is in a hurry to get going, he starts the bus rolling forward. A police officer slaps his hand onto the bus’s side, warning him to wait until Archana has exited.
Minutes later, another bus arrives in another cloud of exhaust. Sangeet Girio grabs his pamphlets and pushes his way on board. He tells passengers: “Watch out for people who give you false dreams of education, food, jobs. Don’t believe it. They’re taking advantage of our honesty.” He asks questions: “Are you alone? Who is with you?”
By 3 p.m., they have boarded 84 buses at this stop. No kids were found, but more than 10,000 passengers got the message.
At another stop in the Kathmandu Valley, 19 children — 11 boys and eight girls between the ages of 10 and 13 from Dolakha — were rescued. Three men from India and a man and woman from Nepal were arrested.
One simple question undid the scam.
“These kids were told they were going to school in India. They were genuinely excited about leaving home and getting an education and a chance for a better life,” says Tarak Dhital, executive director of the Central Child Welfare Board in Kathmandu. “But when asked where they wrote the entrance exam, they didn’t know anything about it.”
The jig was up. Their parents were called and told the children would have been sold. They were registered with child protection authorities and sent home with a stern warning to stay there.
Another 45 children were rescued in similar situations.
On May 26, the government announced a new law: children under 16 are not permitted to travel outside their home district without a parent or another adult approved by the district’s child welfare board. International adoption has been stopped until September. And radio ads can be heard everywhere, saying, “Trafficking is a problem. Keep your kids close.”
Dhital’s office has identified another insidious crime against children: “We have 600 registered care homes (orphanages) in Nepal. The requests to open more after the earthquake have tripled. Some of them are in fact scams for religions that are using the kids to raise money.”
In one case, uncovered by Red Cross workers, the children came from poor families in the mountains who had been told their kids would get a good education and better food in a care home in Kathmandu. In fact, the children were crammed 10 to a room and fed so little they were scavenging for food outside. They had become the focal point of a campaign asking for donations to give these kids a better life.
“In the name of children, these people are stealing money,” says Dhital. His department has stopped issuing new licences, and is reassessing and closing many care homes.
Dolakha is 18 kilometres from the epicentre of the second quake. More than 3,000 people died in this region alone. There’s not a single house that hasn’t been damaged, not even the hospital escaped.
A makeshift collection of tents and tarps now serves as the Gauri Shanker Hospital. This tent is for women in labour. That one is an operating room. The tarps down the hill house both in-patients and out-patients. There is only one doctor, Binod Dangal. The first thing he says to us is, “Thank you for coming.”
In the next 18 hours, Dangal performs an appendectomy, delivers two babies — one by caesarean section because the unborn child was in fetal distress and the mother was flown in by helicopter from another village — lanced an abscessed wound, set a broken arm, sewn up a severed tendon. He’s treating 60 patients a day, doing three or four surgeries and working 24/7.
It’s late, almost 10 p.m., when Durga Shrestha arrives. She and her husband have travelled by bus from their village 18 km north of here. She’s 10 days overdue with their first child.
The look on her face is a cross between hope and despair. The doctor says he will induce labour and if that doesn’t work, he’ll do a caesarean section.
It’s 11 p.m. when he settles a nervous Durga down in the labour tent and promises he’ll alert us “when the baby is coming.”
At 5:30 a.m., the call comes in. She’s labouring hard, grabbing the handles on the edge of the cot while two nurses encourage her — chanting rhythmically in Nepalese, “You must push, you must push” — and playing their fingertips over her bulging abdomen as though to tease the baby from the womb.
The setting is surreal: the soft morning sun lights the blue tent, trucks filled with emergency supplies grind their gears noisily on the road through town just 10 metres away, a rooster crows, the nervous father, Kamal Shrestha, paces outside, cellphone in hand; beside him goats are chewing on the guy wires of the tent.
“Push with all your might,” Dangal instructs Durga. Minutes later, he’s holding a baby in the air and announces joyfully, “It’s a boy.” There’s a hush in the tent. The safe arrival of this child gives pause to everyone — a new life has begun in this district of death.
A reminder of pre-earthquake times is the tremendous rejoicing this child is a boy.
“In Nepal, a girl child is not welcome,” says the doctor. “We need to make changes here,” he says matter-of-factly while stitching up the episiotomy.
The nurses wipe the baby down, check his reflexes, and take him outside to weigh him — a whopping four kilos — and show him to his father. Then, they swaddle the shivering child in blankets, tie a cap on his tiny head and carry the little bundle to his mom.
Tradition says he won’t be named for four days but he’s making his presence well known this morning with his lusty howling, which at last brings a smile to his exhausted mother’s face.
The family will rest in the labour tent tonight. Tomorrow, they will get on the bus for the 90-minute ride over treacherous roads and numerous detours back to their village, where like everyone else, they will sleep outside under a tarp because their own place has been destroyed. Namaste, little newborn. Namaste, Nepal.
“This is a bad time during the emergency; trafficking is a problem. Watch out for unaccompanied kids.”
Archana Tamang , 19