Caught up in the horror
CHCH-BORN WOMAN AMONG MISSING
The family of a Christchurch-born woman missing in Nepal after the magnitude-7.8 earthquake say she ‘‘loved to serve those around her’’ and are asking the public to pray for her safety.
Alicia Scroggins, 21, was part-way through a seven-day trek along the Langtang Valley with a friend and a guide when the quake struck on Saturday.
She is one of at least 16 New Zealandborn people in Nepal unaccounted for, according to a Red Cross list which includes Brendan Reeves, 30, born in Dunedin.
The death toll has passed 3400 and is expected to climb.
Annie Wood said waiting for news of her sister was ‘‘frustrating’’, but the family were hopeful that she was safe and would be on her way back to New Zealand soon.
Scroggins was the youngest of five children and lived in Canterbury before moving with her family to the United States when she was in intermediate school.
She had been back to New Zealand several times since and was living with her parents in Auckland before travelling to Nepal.
‘‘[Alicia] loves to serve those around her,’’ Wood said. ‘‘She has done some missions work and we know she will be trying to help anyone around her who needs it.’’
Meanwhile, 26 Christchurch schoolgirls travelling in Nepal may not be able to come home this week as planned due to challenges getting to the airport and uncertainty about when they can fly.
The St Margaret’s College pupils and four teachers were near the end of a three-week expedition with World Challenge when the devastating quake struck.
They had planned to return home on Thursday, but World Challenge national manager Alice Rowe said that might not be possible while flights out of the country remained disrupted.
The pupils were safe, comfortable and were ‘‘camping out’’ until they could get back to the capital, Kathmandu.
They had been able to use their experiences from Canterbury’s earthquakes to help locals – something that had been one of the purposes of their trip – but Rowe said they would have preferred to achieve that ‘‘without the drama’’ of a national disaster.
Nelson woman Dulkara Martig was leading a trek with one of the St Margaret’s groups in the city of Pokhara when the quake hit.
She said she had flashbacks of the Christchurch quakes as she ran for safety.
‘‘At first we thought it was just a truck rattling past, because the buildings are slightly dodgy anyway and it’s normal for them to shake a bit, but we quickly realised it was going on for too long and I immediately had flashbacks to the Canterbury quakes, the ground was moving beneath us in the same sort of way.’’
Martig said everyone ran into the middle of the street: ‘‘Many people were hugging, crying, yelling out, and desperately trying to phone relatives to check
they were safe. We managed to have some brief conversations with locals immediately after the quake and they said they were very afraid and it was the biggest earthquake they’d ever felt.’’
Martig and the three St Marga- ret’s girls she was with rushed back to the hotel and found everyone else in their group was safe.
‘‘The following few hours felt quite surreal and there were a number of larger aftershocks, just like in Christchurch. We headed to an open courtyard area, sheltered from large buildings.’’
St Margaret’s College principal Gillian Simpson said the situation was hard for the girls’ parents, but they knew they were fine.
The school met with the parents on Monday night, she said.
One group was about 100 kilometres from the airport, trekking near Pokhara, while the other was about 40km away and had been building a school.
‘‘They’ve got a lot of logistics to work out. We know they’re OK, that’s the main thing,’’ Simpson said. ‘‘We just have to wait.’’ All climbers and climbing Sherpa with Wanaka-based Adven- ture Consultants at Mt Everest’s Camp One and Two were safely airlifted to Base Camp.
Company spokesman and senior guide Steve Moffat, in Wanaka, said helicopters were flown continuously to airlift the 22 people from the camps to base camp.