Nepal’s trauma

Notes from the field:

These selected stories were published in Himal Southasian, in the immediate aftermath of the April 25 earthquake in Nepal, offering insight into the relief to recovery phase of a devastated land.

Recovering Harisiddhi

by Puja Sen and Shubhanga Pandey

Harisiddhi town is all dust, bricks and stones. The earthquake on 25 April devastated almost all the old brick houses in the area, leaving 23 people dead and 100 injured in the town of over 20,000 inhabitants. As formal and informal institutions around the country ramp up their relief efforts, this old medieval town in Lalitpur illustrates how some areas, especially those located inside the Kathmandu Valley, appear to have transitioned into the second phase of relief efforts, despite the intense scale of destruction.

The town is an example of an area with concentrated relief from several channels – the local Newar community and its extensions throughout Kathmandu, the state in the form of police, private corporate social responsibility relief groups such as Prabhu Insurance, and INGOs such as the Red Cross and Habitat for Humanity. In comparison to Nepal’s rural districts, some of which are still waiting for aid and relief, Harisiddhi demonstrates the kind of self-help and reliance on informal and formal networks present within the capital city, which many in affected areas within the Valley have been able to tap into.

While most areas in the country still desperately need temporary sheds or tents, Harisiddhi is well-provided for as people camp under shelter provided by the Nepal Red Cross.

Food supply does not appear to be a problem either: there are three centres where food and ration are being distributed. A local store nearby, behind a still-intact temple and amidst the dusty rubble, is still functioning, although new supplies are slow in coming.

With the immediate needs regarding food and shelter taken care of, the inhabitants have moved on to retrieving household items, and opening up the streets blocked by the debris. In a particularly dense area, there are about 20 police personnel, all employed in excavating two ghyampos (large copper vessels) used for storing grains or cooking large quantities of food during ceremonial feasts. A few metres away from this rescue operation is a building. Though the building has suffered heavy damage and appears precarious, three men and one woman are trying to retrieve their belongings from the second floor. A volunteer trying to assist in the effort is annoyed. “Why do they need 20 policemen there,” she says, nodding towards the ghyampo rescue operation.

As we take the exit out of Harisiddhi, a health centre with a whiteboard and two large sheets with information about the earthquake perhaps best demonstrates the level of organisation and activity in the area. The whiteboard has numbers on the total dead, injured and houses destroyed, and the adjacent sheet lists out the name and age of all 23 who died there.

The third sheet lists names of people who have been assigned various responsibilities: someone managing the committee for relief material collection and distribution; another responsible for the information on houses that have collapsed; another one for those houses that have been damaged; a team of six looking at sanitation, search and rescue works; and a group of engineers and a photographer led by someone from the ward office to survey the destroyed houses. As it is to be expected, some areas get a large rush of aid and media coverage, while others are neglected. It would be impossible to have precise and exact coordination and distribution of relief distribution, because some of these are being worked out in real time by different groups or networks. Much still needs to be done, and can be done at Harisiddhi. But the new stories of devastation and destitution emerging each day are a sobering reminder of the fact that more relief needs to flow into the rural expanse of the central hills of Nepal.

Shubhanga Pandey and Puja Sen are Assistant Editors with Himal Southasian

From the banks of Bagmati

by Slok Gyawall

Were it not for the partially collapsed building, Arya Ghat, the largest cremation site in Kathmandu, adjacent to the Pashupati would look almost the same as before.

Just ten days after the earthquake, tourists are back as are devotees and mourners. Visitors gawk at the temples, believers bow their heads, and sadhus of all hues loiter among the sprinkling of monuments overlooking the Bagmati River. But not all is the same of course.

For one, the cremation site has been forced to cremate hundreds of people since the April 25 earthquake, a trend that continues as more and more dead bodies are retrieved from under the rubble and many of those seriously injured succumb to their injuries.

Between 25 April and 5 May, the 25 people employed by the Pashupati Area Development Trust (PADT), (which manages the cremation ground adjacent to the Pashupati temple), helped cremate over 530 people, most of them from Kathmandu Valley where the death toll has crossed 1680.

Many of those cremated are unidentified. Others are brought by family members, but the cremation is a quick affair unlike the usual elaborate rituals.

“Grieving families usually accompany the body of their loved ones. But the police also brought in about 20 unidentified bodies some days back. I guess rather than wait for the bodies to rot, they wanted to cremate it,” says Shabho Paudel, an office manager at Arya Ghat.

The number of bodies coming in peaked on 26 April when 154 earthquake victims were cremated. On the morning of 4 May only 4 bodies had come in. In between stoking a funeral pyre with a bamboo shaft, Pushparaj Paudel, puffs away at his cigarette. Paudel, who has been helping with cremation rituals at Pashupati for the last 10 years, says it’s been a long week.

When the bodies started to come in on the evening of 25 April, Paudel was at home. When he did report back on duty the next day, he was overwhelmed by the number of bodies that needed to be cremated. “We put them in a line and lit the fire. I had no rest for the next two days and nights as the bodies kept coming in. All day and night our team worked tirelessly; we only drank Frooti. We did the best we could.”

While Hindu cremation rituals are broadly the same, they differ along ethnic and caste lines. Under normal circumstances the cremation at the Arya Ghat caters to community-specific rituals, but the first few days after the earthquake there was no scope of doing this. Paudel says that they even cremated Christians –which he clarifies is not that unusual. For believers, being cremated at Pashupati, a major Shiva Temple on the banks of the holy river Bagmati, eases entry into paradise; this partially explains the rush at this particular cremation site.

For many across Nepal cremating the dead has always been a challenge, but more so after 25 April. A funeral which can consumes up to 250kg of firewood is a luxury where many are still waiting for relief aid.

After the earthquake the government also instructed PADT to provide the big logs necessary for the pyre for free; the families still had to purchase the small logs and other necessities. Across the central hills of Nepal, villages are burying their dead in mass graves rather than cremating them.

Slok Gyawali is an assistant editor at Himal Southasian

Photo: Flickr / Greg Willis

Offering shelter with prayers

by Abhimanyu Pandey

Most survivors of the cataclysmic events of 25 April that destroyed the village of Langtang, in Rasuwa District, are currently living in a relief camp in Swayambhu, a hilltop with several Buddhist sites, located in the western part of Kathmandu Valley. The camp is inside the compound of the Yellow Gompa, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery of the Gelugpa order.

Following the earthquake, the monastery has offered its compound as temporary shelter for people who have lost their homes.Survivors began to be flown in to the camp from the village of Kyanjin Gompa in Langtang Valley from 27 April. Further up from Langtang village, the impact of the earthquake on this village is less severe than other areas in Langtang. Almost everyone who has survived has either come, or been brought, to the Yellow Gompa for temporary stay. Between five to 15 new survivors of Langtang are flown in everyday and the total number of those in the camp is now 111.

The area of the camp is about half the size of a football field, consisting of several multi-coloured tents cramped together. Two large canvas tents, normally used by the monastery during religious events, operate as a billowing umbrella over the tents and open space underneath. The people there – whether young or old – seem listless.

With the class 12 exams slated to take place in less than a month, several older students are finding it difficult to focus and prepare for the tests. A few young men help in unloading and storing consignments of food supplies, blankets and toiletries that have arrived as donations in a room provided by the monastery. All the supplies coming into the camp at present are donation, mostly from private tourist companies, trekking and mountaineering associations, Buddhist organisations, volunteers and foreign nationals. The monastery prepares the food from the ration received as donations, and also provides water for washing clothes. Most that have arrived in the camp only have the clothes they are wearing as their sole material possessions.

Everyone in the camp has lost one or more relatives, and nearly everything they own is lost. Their injuries range from bruises to multiple fractures. Many children appear oblivious to the fact that they are now orphans. Yet, understandably, many still dream of going back to Langtang and rebuilding their village as soon as things begin to settle down. “Langtang is our home. It is the only place and way of life we have known,” says Jangbu Tamang, an 18-year-old who lost his mother in the earthquake.

The dream for return, however, seems to be wishful thinking: initial reports indicate that the Langtang landscape will continue to remain dangerously unstable at least till the end of the coming monsoon. The villagers seem to be aware of this situation too, but at the moment they can’t think of other options of livelihood and settlement in Kathmandu Valley. Meanwhile, they are trying to negotiate with the monastery to allow them to extend their stay in its compound for a few more weeks, till they find another place in the city.

Abhimanyu Pandey is a Kathmandu-based consultant with International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD)

Is anyone looking for Ishvar?

by Rudra Rakshit

Days following the catastrophic quake of 25 April, hospitals in Nepal are filled beyond their capacity to treat casualties and the injured of varying degrees.

Two hospitals, the Bir Hospital (NAMS, National Academy of Medical Sciences) and the Teaching Hospital (Tribhuvan University’s non-profitable hospital), both situated in Kathmandu, are the two main hospitals treating and tending to the injured.

Families, relatives, friends of the patients and lightly-injured people occupy benches and corners of every floor in the hospital. The long corridors on the first floor house the male and female surgical wards, and the post-operation theatre.

Inside the female surgical ward in room number 211, bed A, was the 19-year-old Ishvar Subedi from Dolakha District, 133 kilometres east of Kathmandu. A nurse brought a portable X-ray machine into the room and was trying to place the film plate underneath Ishvar’s back. I offered help, holding his right hand I lifted him slightly. As she placed the 11-by-14 plate in position, the nurse tells me that his left arm is shattered. She asks me to move back, both of us step out and she pushes the trigger to begin the exposure. We go back in. This time Ishvar is in pain and insists on holding my arm as the nurse brings the exposed X-ray plate out. I leave Ishvar to rest and the nurse to tend to others.

On 1 May, 2015, two days later, I went back to check on Ishvar. I was informed that he has been shifted to the post-operation theatre. The nurse in the female surgical ward tells me that he was discharging cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) from his ears and was scheduled to be operated.At the post operation ward, I saw Ishvar sleeping on a thick pad of cotton and gauze underneath his head. I met Dr. Harmeet Gulati, who was getting ready to leave home. He stays back to tell me about Ishvar’s condition, explaining that his left arm was operated yesterday but his skull is still severely fractured. The yellow fluid coming out of his ears is the result of an infection that has developed inside. Ishvar’s records indicate that he was brought into the hospital on 27 April by a volunteer from Gyaneshwar, Kathmandu, where he worked as an errand boy. On probing by the other doctors present, Ishvar tells us that his father’s name is Nila Bahadur Subedi and works in a security agency in Qatar. He does not remember his mother’s name. He says his younger brother’s name is Umesh Subedi, a class 10 student at Shanti Adarsh Higher Secondary School, a couple of kilometres away from his house in Singadi village, in Dolakha. He doesn’t remember most of people and contact numbers. Dr. Gulati says his condition is serious but he can be saved, adding it would be easier to take things forward if someone from his family was present.We got in touch with the police to help locate his family or relatives but without success.

Rudra Rakshit is a freelance photographer and writer based in Bangalore