Peter Hillary pleads for Kiwis to support Nepal with Covid crisis
Sir Edmund Hillary’s son Peter Hillary has spoken out about the unfolding coronavirus crisis in Nepal, off the back of hearing the heartbreaking personal experience of one of his senior staffers at the Kathmandu-based Himalayan Trust.
Speaking with theSunday StarTimes, Peter Hillary said the situation in the South Asian country, which shares a border with the north of virus-ravaged India, was devastating.
‘‘It’s just desperate,’’ he said, adding that he and his wife were in tears reading emails from his friend of 20 years, the trust’s finance and administration officer Baween Raj Tandukar.
Hillary has asked for compassion and generosity from Kiwis to support Nepal, with which he said Aotearoa shared a special bond through his late father’s legacy.
As well as establishing the trust – a non-profit that works to reduce poverty, improve health and education and bring safe water to Nepal’s remote communities – and being the first climber alongside Tenzing Norgay to reach the summit of Mt Everest, Sir Edmund built the first school in the Everest region.
In the emails to Hillary, Tandukar wrote that the Nepalese Covid-19 crisis had been evolving rapidly. Tandukar’s mother, who was living with her husband, Tandukar’s brother and his wife, ‘‘deteriorated suddenly’’ after contracting mild symptoms. She was taken to the hospital and admitted to the intensive care unit, but staff later told the family she would have to leave because she needed to be somewhere with an oxygen ventilator – equipment that is in desperately short supply in Nepal.
During her transfer between hospitals, she died. ‘‘All we could do was get her body out of the ambulance,’’ Tandukar, himself recovering from Covid-19, wrote.
The family then had to wait another day for the Nepalese Army to transfer her body to a crematorium: ‘‘We were only allowed to offer some flowers from a distance, when the body – sealed in plastic body bag – was placed near the gate of the crematorium.’’
The same day his mother died, Tandukar had to move his cousin, aged 34, to an ICU ward because of a bed and oxygen shortage in Kathmandu’s Patan Hospital. ‘‘My cousin is very close to me and it was unbearably painful to watch him suffer.’’
After five days, he also died. ‘‘I had to take care of three families and the rituals afterwards as most of the relatives whom I could
rely on were all sick remained isolated due lockdown. This is too much bear in two weeks,’’ he wrote.
‘‘I hope this is the last bit of bad news for my family and all my further communications will be joyful and stories of success and happiness. I am very glad and feel fortunate that my father, my brother, his wife and all other close relatives have recovered now.’’
Tandukar told of families stockpiling food and other essential items, sleepless widows bereft
and to to
by their husbands’ deaths, pregnant women dying and leaving children motherless, and people being unwilling to help those with symptoms out of fear of catching the virus themselves.
He said hospitals were asking for hundreds of thousands of rupees before starting treatment on patients, and demanding additional deposits as days pass by. There were medicine exchanges happening on the black market, and the Nepalese Army was using trucks to carry up to 20 bodies in a single trip to crematories, he said.
‘‘The statistics shown in the media are just a number for others, but I see my mother and my brother when I look at the number of dead and the sweet memories of time spent together and our future dreams and plans that remained unfulfilled.’’
He said he still had not found the appropriate words to paint a true picture of the situation. ‘‘We desperately need help irrespective of what, how much or from where. We need it soon and we need it now.’’
As Everest Day approaches on May 29, Peter Hillary was asking Kiwis to donate to the trust, which is raising funds for Nepal.
Hillary said his father was a man who respected science and medicine, and would have wanted people to ‘‘do something’’ about the crisis. ‘‘This is an emergency. We need to divert our interest and resources to help people deal with this absolute calamity.’’
As of yesterday, Nepal had 488,645 confirmed cases of the virus, and 5847 deaths. Only 1.49 per cent of the country’s 29 million people have received the vaccine.
‘‘The statistics shown in the media are just a number for others, but I see my mother and my brother.’’ Baween Raj Tandukar