Damaged houses are seen from an Indian Army helicopter following an earthquake in the Nepalese area of Gorkha on April 28, 2015. (Agence France-Presse)
RAMCHE, Nepal:
Madhu Badu had been on the road for the better part of three days, trying to get back to his native village, back to his wife and children, near the epicenter of Nepal's devastating earthquake northwest of Kathmandu. His journey had begun on a bus, but the roads had become impassable and now he was on foot.
As he climbed a dirt path strewed with boulders and the muddy debris of landslides, hints of the devastation that awaited him in Ramche greeted him like ominous signposts: an elderly woman, groaning in pain, draped on the back of a man who was carrying her down the mountain; a hamlet where residents were burying the dead; piles of stone rubble where farmhouses once stood.
Desperate residents appeared from the forests, pleading for help from Badu and a journalist. "We lost everything!" cried one, Baldev Bhatta, his eyes bloodshot. "You are the first outsiders to come here. We have no grain. We have no money. We cannot rebuild on our own. You need to send this news to the world."
At each stop on the way up the mountain, farmers offered to show Badu the ruins of their houses. He pressed forward instead. He knew his own family was safe - he had tried calling his wife for four hours Saturday before he finally got through - but she said the village had been badly damaged and he was anxious to help.
Across the countryside outside Kathmandu, tens if not hundreds of thousands of people are making similar desperate journeys, abandoning the jobs that had drawn them from home in better times and traveling through difficult terrain to get back to isolated villages like Ramche that have been all but cut off from the world.
Three days after Nepal's worst earthquake in 80 years hit on Saturday, the official death toll climbed past 5,000 and the prime minister, Sushil Koirala, said it could reach 10,000. But the extent of the destruction and loss of life in the countryside remained largely unknown.
Here in the Gorkha district, the epicenter of the magnitude 7.8 quake, roads that are repaired or cleared during the day are often blocked before the next morning by landslides, making it difficult to reach communities where hundreds are feared dead. In a sign of progress, though, convoys of aid workers, some bearing the banners of Nepalese companies, could be seen driving through the region on Tuesday. Helicopters have also been ferrying the wounded out of the area.
When the quake struck, Badu, 51, was in Solukhumbu, about 100 miles northeast of here, at a trekking station at the base of Mount Everest where he works in construction.
He spent the next two days on buses before beginning his trek at dawn on Tuesday by foot. He carried two plastic tarpaulins, a down jacket and a bag filled with apples and grapes. It was part care package, part aid delivery.
Before the earthquake, he said, life in the villages in this impoverished region had improved. They had electricity and cellphone coverage, and the dirt roads were more or less acceptable. But now there was no power, and communications were spotty.
In almost every hamlet on the way up to Ramche, residents reported deaths from the quake. At least in those places, none appeared to have suffered mass casualties.
Finally, as Badu approached Ramche, a vista of destruction came into focus. The village where he had grown up had been almost completely leveled.
On a bluff with sweeping views of the verdant valleys below, all that was left of the high school was a huge jumble of timber beams, slate roof tiles and broken stone walls. Almost every house had collapsed. Most people in the village of several hundred survived, but they were living under makeshift tents, much of their food supplies unreachable in their collapsed homes. Two seriously wounded women lay in a stable with the water buffaloes.
Badu's home was one of the few left standing in Ramche. "I imagined that my house was completely destroyed," he said. "I have food to eat. The others have nothing."
While the conditions in remote Ramche were particularly dire, even in the capital of Kathmandu, the scale of suffering was breathtaking, and a growing sense of frustration with the government was palpable.
Although the government has established 16 large camps in the city, many other residents are making do by sleeping on the street or in open spaces away from damaged buildings and walls. Even in the tent camps, residents have complained that help is not reaching them or is arriving too slowly. Many accuse government officials of incompetence and neglect, and residents voice suspicions that officials are hoarding the aid supplies for themselves.
"Only this tent was provided by the government, but for everything else, we have had to rely on our own labors," said Sudesh Tulachan, a building worker and shop owner sheltering from the rain under a large canopy. "You can see how many humans are in need."
One of the biggest worries is that supplies of clean drinking water will run out, and that with many water pipes likely cracked, any water running from taps could be contaminated.
The government defended itself, saying that there are pressing needs everywhere, and that trying to get to villages that have had no government help was a priority. And Jamie McGoldrick, the U.N. resident coordinator for Nepal, said in a telephone interview that "the bureaucracy has been a bit slow, but they did seem to get organized in the past 24 hours."
Some relief organization workers also said that delivering help to villages was a physical challenge that would test any government. McGoldrick's office on Monday cited estimates that the earthquake had affected 8 million people in the country, including 2 million in the 11 worst affected districts.
"The geography is very, very difficult," Peter Oyloe, the director for nutrition for Save the Children in Nepal, said in a telephone interview.
In the devastated village of Ramche, Badu, visibly shaken, stopped in what used to be the courtyard of the high school, considering what might have happened if the earthquake had not struck on a Saturday when its 500 students were off. Protruding from the rubble was a partly rolled-up map, the kind used in geography classes, titled "America - political."
The only people in the building when the quake struck were 18 teachers in a training session. One of them, Netra Prasad Devkota, now stood in the courtyard holding a muddied copy of the materials they had been studying when the school "started to crack into pieces."
"I shouted, 'Earthquake!'" he recalled. "We all ran."
Devkota and several others managed to escape from the school amid a huge cloud of dust. But eight of the teachers were buried in the rubble. Four were killed, and four were later pulled alive from the debris.
A resident called a friend who is a helicopter pilot in the Nepalese armed forces. The pilot reached the village on Sunday and evacuated the wounded teachers. "The pilot came out of friendship," said Bumi Nanda Devkota, another native of Ramche who had also rushed home. "There has been no help from the government since."
Many residents survived the quake because they were working in the fields where they grow wheat and rice. Jhyali Maya Devkota, 63, said she was inside her house, but lunged toward the door when the tremors began.
"We were told to stand in the door frame," she said. "Those were the instructions they always gave on television. That is how I survived."
Residents said no doctors had come to see their wounded, not even the women in the stable, the two most seriously injured people still in the village. One of those women moaned miserably, her leg swollen and her foot wrapped in gauze.
"The voice of poor people like us is not heard," said Tejnath Puddasin, her son.
Badu said he felt very fortunate that his house survived.
The village had clean water, but grain from the last harvest had been largely in the ruins of the houses that collapsed. Residents still had vegetables and livestock, but were worried that they would not last long.
Badu's wife, Bishnu, returned home from the fields in the late morning to find her husband waiting for her. "This is big happiness for me," she said.
Despite the reunion, though, she said she remained nervous. "The school collapsed, four teachers died and I fear there will be more earthquakes," she said. "I don't feel lucky."
As he climbed a dirt path strewed with boulders and the muddy debris of landslides, hints of the devastation that awaited him in Ramche greeted him like ominous signposts: an elderly woman, groaning in pain, draped on the back of a man who was carrying her down the mountain; a hamlet where residents were burying the dead; piles of stone rubble where farmhouses once stood.
Desperate residents appeared from the forests, pleading for help from Badu and a journalist. "We lost everything!" cried one, Baldev Bhatta, his eyes bloodshot. "You are the first outsiders to come here. We have no grain. We have no money. We cannot rebuild on our own. You need to send this news to the world."
At each stop on the way up the mountain, farmers offered to show Badu the ruins of their houses. He pressed forward instead. He knew his own family was safe - he had tried calling his wife for four hours Saturday before he finally got through - but she said the village had been badly damaged and he was anxious to help.
Across the countryside outside Kathmandu, tens if not hundreds of thousands of people are making similar desperate journeys, abandoning the jobs that had drawn them from home in better times and traveling through difficult terrain to get back to isolated villages like Ramche that have been all but cut off from the world.
Three days after Nepal's worst earthquake in 80 years hit on Saturday, the official death toll climbed past 5,000 and the prime minister, Sushil Koirala, said it could reach 10,000. But the extent of the destruction and loss of life in the countryside remained largely unknown.
Here in the Gorkha district, the epicenter of the magnitude 7.8 quake, roads that are repaired or cleared during the day are often blocked before the next morning by landslides, making it difficult to reach communities where hundreds are feared dead. In a sign of progress, though, convoys of aid workers, some bearing the banners of Nepalese companies, could be seen driving through the region on Tuesday. Helicopters have also been ferrying the wounded out of the area.
When the quake struck, Badu, 51, was in Solukhumbu, about 100 miles northeast of here, at a trekking station at the base of Mount Everest where he works in construction.
He spent the next two days on buses before beginning his trek at dawn on Tuesday by foot. He carried two plastic tarpaulins, a down jacket and a bag filled with apples and grapes. It was part care package, part aid delivery.
Before the earthquake, he said, life in the villages in this impoverished region had improved. They had electricity and cellphone coverage, and the dirt roads were more or less acceptable. But now there was no power, and communications were spotty.
In almost every hamlet on the way up to Ramche, residents reported deaths from the quake. At least in those places, none appeared to have suffered mass casualties.
Finally, as Badu approached Ramche, a vista of destruction came into focus. The village where he had grown up had been almost completely leveled.
On a bluff with sweeping views of the verdant valleys below, all that was left of the high school was a huge jumble of timber beams, slate roof tiles and broken stone walls. Almost every house had collapsed. Most people in the village of several hundred survived, but they were living under makeshift tents, much of their food supplies unreachable in their collapsed homes. Two seriously wounded women lay in a stable with the water buffaloes.
Badu's home was one of the few left standing in Ramche. "I imagined that my house was completely destroyed," he said. "I have food to eat. The others have nothing."
While the conditions in remote Ramche were particularly dire, even in the capital of Kathmandu, the scale of suffering was breathtaking, and a growing sense of frustration with the government was palpable.
Although the government has established 16 large camps in the city, many other residents are making do by sleeping on the street or in open spaces away from damaged buildings and walls. Even in the tent camps, residents have complained that help is not reaching them or is arriving too slowly. Many accuse government officials of incompetence and neglect, and residents voice suspicions that officials are hoarding the aid supplies for themselves.
"Only this tent was provided by the government, but for everything else, we have had to rely on our own labors," said Sudesh Tulachan, a building worker and shop owner sheltering from the rain under a large canopy. "You can see how many humans are in need."
One of the biggest worries is that supplies of clean drinking water will run out, and that with many water pipes likely cracked, any water running from taps could be contaminated.
The government defended itself, saying that there are pressing needs everywhere, and that trying to get to villages that have had no government help was a priority. And Jamie McGoldrick, the U.N. resident coordinator for Nepal, said in a telephone interview that "the bureaucracy has been a bit slow, but they did seem to get organized in the past 24 hours."
Some relief organization workers also said that delivering help to villages was a physical challenge that would test any government. McGoldrick's office on Monday cited estimates that the earthquake had affected 8 million people in the country, including 2 million in the 11 worst affected districts.
"The geography is very, very difficult," Peter Oyloe, the director for nutrition for Save the Children in Nepal, said in a telephone interview.
In the devastated village of Ramche, Badu, visibly shaken, stopped in what used to be the courtyard of the high school, considering what might have happened if the earthquake had not struck on a Saturday when its 500 students were off. Protruding from the rubble was a partly rolled-up map, the kind used in geography classes, titled "America - political."
The only people in the building when the quake struck were 18 teachers in a training session. One of them, Netra Prasad Devkota, now stood in the courtyard holding a muddied copy of the materials they had been studying when the school "started to crack into pieces."
"I shouted, 'Earthquake!'" he recalled. "We all ran."
Devkota and several others managed to escape from the school amid a huge cloud of dust. But eight of the teachers were buried in the rubble. Four were killed, and four were later pulled alive from the debris.
A resident called a friend who is a helicopter pilot in the Nepalese armed forces. The pilot reached the village on Sunday and evacuated the wounded teachers. "The pilot came out of friendship," said Bumi Nanda Devkota, another native of Ramche who had also rushed home. "There has been no help from the government since."
Many residents survived the quake because they were working in the fields where they grow wheat and rice. Jhyali Maya Devkota, 63, said she was inside her house, but lunged toward the door when the tremors began.
"We were told to stand in the door frame," she said. "Those were the instructions they always gave on television. That is how I survived."
Residents said no doctors had come to see their wounded, not even the women in the stable, the two most seriously injured people still in the village. One of those women moaned miserably, her leg swollen and her foot wrapped in gauze.
"The voice of poor people like us is not heard," said Tejnath Puddasin, her son.
Badu said he felt very fortunate that his house survived.
The village had clean water, but grain from the last harvest had been largely in the ruins of the houses that collapsed. Residents still had vegetables and livestock, but were worried that they would not last long.
Badu's wife, Bishnu, returned home from the fields in the late morning to find her husband waiting for her. "This is big happiness for me," she said.
Despite the reunion, though, she said she remained nervous. "The school collapsed, four teachers died and I fear there will be more earthquakes," she said. "I don't feel lucky."
© 2015, The New York Times News Service
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