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.
Photo: AFP
“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 on 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.
Days after Nepal’s worst earthquake in 80 years hit on Saturday, the extent of the destruction and loss of life in the countryside remained largely unknown.
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.
When the quake struck, Badu, 51, was in Solukhumbu, about 161km northeast of Ramche, 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.
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.
“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.”
Jamie McGoldrick, the UN 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.
“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.
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 said. “We all ran.”
Devkota and several others managed to escape from the school amid a huge cloud of dust. However, 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.”
Badu said he felt very fortunate that his house survived.
His 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, adding that she still felt nervous about more earthquakes.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was