Kathmandu — Somewhere among the immense spew of mud brick and broken timber that Bachulaxmi Shrestha now surveys is the home she shared with her family, the fruit and veg shop that was her livelihood, and the treasured keepsakes she had picked up over her 60 years.
All of it was lost, instantly destroyed and commingled with two neighbouring houses, when the first 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck the Nepalese village of Chapagaun at lunchtime on 25 April.
Shrestha was at work when it hit. “I ran outside and seconds later, the building collapsed behind me,” she says. “It fell and then the others next to it fell.”
Dizzy and terrified, she stood, looked at what had been her house, and wept.
“Soon, lots of people came to the open space where I was and we all stood and cried for a long time while the earth shook,” she says. “We were so scared.”
A month after the disaster that killed more than 8,000 people and left thousands injured and homeless, Chapagaun, which lies half an hour’s drive from Kathmandu, remains a village trapped in an anxious limbo. Many of the houses that withstood the quake and the dozens of aftershocks that have followed are too badly cracked to be habitable and their owners too fearful to set foot in them.
In the absence of permanent shelter, 200 villagers have established a temporary camp in a square, where they eat and sleep together. While the men scavenge the ruins and try to demolish them brick-by-brick, the women work if they can. Children, meanwhile, play in child-friendly spaces (CFSs), hundreds of which have been set up across Nepal by NGOs. Part-creche, part-school and part-psychosocial treatment centre, the spaces are designed to give children a fragment of the normality destroyed by the quake.
At the Chapagaun CFS, run by the youth-led NGO Restless Development, girls sing hill country songs and dance while the boys do jigsaw puzzles made from bits of cut-up calendars.
Neeva Shrestha is a 19-year-old student who was about to sit her exams when the quake struck. She spends her days helping the other children and attempting to reassure her mother, who is permanently dizzy and worried that the earth will split open again at any moment.
“I’ve been trying to keep my mum calm; I’m afraid too, but I am trying to be strong for her,” she says. “We feel safe in the camp even though everyone is too afraid to go back home.”
Unlike many of the camps set up in the aftermath of the quake, the temporary shelter in Chapagaun has become a genuine refuge: the closeness of the community has been reinforced by the disaster. The women there have no fear of sexual assault and the children no anxiety about the traffickers who use such catastrophes to lure them away from their parents and into orphanages or sexual exploitation.
“We eat and pass the time together,” says Neeva. “The earthquake has made the future very dark, but it’s nice to see the young children laughing and playing again.”
The situation elsewhere in Nepal is far bleaker.
A helicopter flight across the central Sindhupalchok district – one of the worst-affected areas – reveals an ugly tapestry. Crows swoop over tumbles of brick and concrete that were once homes and schools, beams protrude through shattered roof tiles like open fractures and entire villages lie flattened. Orange, blue, yellow and white tents and tarpaulins confetti the steeply terraced hillsides, while people and animals stare up shyly from dwellings that look incapable of sheltering any life at all.
Chautara municipality, the district’s headquarters, has the look of a war zone. Many of its taller buildings list at vertiginous and improbable angles, cricket stumps smashed by a brutal ball. Around and beneath them, the hills of rubble disclose the occasional door, window and sheet of twisted corrugated iron. High up on what must have been the second floor of one house, a kitchen cupboard clings to an external wall, tins and packets of food still sitting on its shelves.
Krishna Gyawali, chief district officer of Sindhupalchok, sums up the damage with a handful of numbers: 4,242 people killed across the district, 4,000 injured, 44 still missing and 95% of homes destroyed.
“We’ve lost schools, health facilities and government offices,” he says. “Most of our villages are in very remote areas; it takes five days to walk to some of them with relief items, but we’re trying our best. People are in a very difficult situation; they’ve lost their family and their children are suffering. They want to go to safe places.”
About 400 people are camped out around the Norwegian Red Cross field hospital, sleeping 12 to a tent. With the monsoon season expected to arrive within a few weeks, Oxfam, Save the Children, the International Organisation for Migration, the Red Cross and others are working with the police, army and government to keep people as safe as possible.
Among the technical discussions of the relative merits of different kinds of tarpaulins and the possibility of upgrading to corrugated iron-roofed shelters, there is a familiar and nagging concern.
“The areas affected by the quake have traditionally been high-traffic areas for taking girls to Indian brothels, but they’re also used for internal trafficking,” says Bimal Rawal, a child protection adviser for Save the Children. Although he praises the Nepalese government for putting a moratorium on international adoptions and banning the registration of new orphanages following the quake, Rawal says people are still trying to take children to orphanages in Kathmandu, where they are used in funding appeals.
“All the agencies need to keep an eye on children,” he says. “Everything is important but it’s easy to overlook children in the relief efforts.”
His warning is echoed by Virginia Pérez, chief of child protection in Nepal for Unicef, the UN children’s agency. Sitting on the concrete stands of Tundikhel, a military parade ground in the centre of Kathmandu that is now home to hundreds of displaced families, she stresses the importance of keeping families together over the coming months.
“The best thing we can do is make sure that kids stay with their parents,” she says. “The Nepalese government has put together a package to help vulnerable children – those who have lost their homes, are being looked after by neighbours, lone girls – and that needs to be properly targeted.”
However, it is not just children who are at risk. Saraswoti Gautam, whose house was destroyed, brings her children to the Tundikhel camp each day but is too worried about the threat of sexual violence to stay there overnight. “We go back to another camp each night because we don’t want to share a tent with the men here,” she says.
Justine Greening, the UK’s secretary of state for international development – who visited Nepal last week – said some of the £33m the British government had pledged to help Nepal would be spent on protecting women and children, with £10m earmarked for primary healthcare and rebuilding hospitals.
“We know that primary care has been hugely disrupted by this earthquake – children not getting the immunisations and vaccinations they normally would do and pregnant women not able to give birth in a safe place with skilled midwives,” she told the Guardian. “There’s also family planning, which is critical for women.”
She added: “We’re doing a lot of work around women and girls and making sure that children can stay safe. In these situations women and girls and children are always vulnerable.”
Greening said that the earthquake highlighted the importance of working to prepare for natural disasters. She pointed to efforts over the past four years to preposition emergency supplies in Nepal and improve the country’s healthcare capacity.
She also said £2m contributed by the Department for International Development to the construction of World Food Programme humanitarian staging areas in Nepal had proved key to the emergency response. One such area was opened close to Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan airport just four weeks before the earthquake struck.
“Had the staging base for humanitarian supplies not been [in place] before the quake, the World Food Programme estimates the whole relief operation would have been pushed back three weeks, because all of that stuff would have come into the airport and been stuck on the tarmac and clogged up an already small airport even more,” she said.
Although the talk has already turned to learning lessons from the quake and focusing on “building back better”, managing the psychological aftershocks of the disaster has emerged as one of the main challenges for relief workers.
For Pérez and her colleagues – and chief district officer Gyawali – the second, 7.3 magnitude quake that hit Nepal on 12 May was almost as shattering as the first, despite being weaker.
“The emotional impact of the second quake has been devastating on all levels,” says Pérez. “It’s delaying the recovery process and people are losing faith. The geologists may just call it an aftershock, but we call it the second quake: it’s been a double quake.”
Gyawali refers to 12 May simply as the day “everything went back to zero”: within seconds, 1,000 people were running to the flat ground where the Norwegian Red Cross hospital in Chautara sits; 45 minutes after that, the first battered pick-up truck rolled into town, carrying casualties from the surrounding area.
In Chapagaun, the close community suffers fresh agonies with each new tectonic twitch. A little before 3pm on Wednesday, a 4.4-magnitude tremor shook the village, sending the birds screeching into the air and the children screaming into the cover of their tarpaulin camp. It was yet another unnecessary reminder of what had happened – and what may yet lie ahead.
“I’m still very frightened and nervous,” says Bachulaxmi Shrestha. “I lost my home and my family has lost everything. We don’t know what will happen next or if the government will come to help us. All we can do now is try to reclaim whatever we can from our house.”
(This appeared in The Guardian on May 25, 2015)