Schoolteacher Sherbahadur Tamang walks through the southern Nepalese village of Khetbari and describes what happened on Sept. 9: "During the night there was light rain but when we woke, its intensity increased. In an hour or so, the rain became so heavy that we could not see more than a meter in front of us. It was like a wall of water and it sounded like 10,000 lorries. It went on like that until midday. Then all the land started moving like a river."
When it stopped raining, Tamang and the village barely recognized their valley.
In just six hours the Jugedi River, which normally flows for only a few months of the year and is at most about 50m wide in Khetbari, had scoured a 300m-wide path down the valley, leaving a 3m-deep rockscape of giant boulders, trees and rubble in its path.
Hundreds of fields and terraces had been swept away. The irrigation systems built by generations of farmers had gone and houses were demolished or left uninhabitable. Tamang's house survived on a newly formed island.
The residents of Khetbari expect a small flood every decade or so, but what shocked the village was that two large ones have taken place in the last three years.
According to Tamang, a pattern is emerging: "The floods are coming more severely and more frequently. Not only is the rainfall far heavier these days than anyone has ever experienced, it is also coming at different times of the year."
Nepal is on the front line of climate change and variations on Khetbari's experience are now being recorded in communities from the freezing Himalayas of the north to the hot lowland plains of the south. For some people the changes are catastrophic.
"The rains are increasingly unpredictable. We always used to have a little rain each month, but now when there is rain it's very different. It's more concentrated and intense. It means that crop yields are going down," says Tekmadur Majsi, whose land has been progressively washed away by the Tirshuli River.
Majsi now lives with 200 other refugees in tents in a small grove of trees by a highway.
In the south, villagers have many minute observations of a changing climate. One says that wild pigs in the forest now have their young earlier, another says that certain types of rice and cucumber will no longer grow where they used to and a third says that the days are hotter and that some trees now flower twice a year.
Such anecdotal observations are backed by scientists who are recording in Nepal some of the fastest long-term increases in temperatures and rainfall anywhere in the world.
At least 44 of Nepal's and neighboring Bhutan's Himalayan lakes, which collect meltwater from glaciers, are said by the UN to be growing so rapidly they they could flood over their banks within a decade.
Any climate change in Nepal reverberates throughout the region, as nearly 400 million people in northern India and Bangladesh also depend on rainfall and rivers that rise in Nepal.
"Unless the country learns to adapt, then people will suffer greatly," says Gehendra Gurung, a team leader with Practical Action in Nepal, which is trying to help people prepare for change.
In projects around the country, the organization is working with vulnerable villages, helping them build dykes and set up early warning systems. It is also teaching people to grow new crops, introducing drip irrigation and water storage schemes, trying to minimize deforestation which can lead to landslides and introducing renewable energy.
Some people are learning fast and are benefiting. Davandrod Kardigardi, a farmer in the Chitwan village of Bharlang, was taught to grow fruit and -- against his father's advice -- planted many banana trees.
As other farmers have struggled, he has increased his income.
But Nepal as a country needs help adapting to climate change, Gurung says.
The country's emissions of damaging greenhouse gases are negligible, yet it finds itself on the front line of climate change.
"Western countries can control their emissions but to mitigate the effects will take a long time. Until then they can help countries like Nepal to adapt. But it means everyone must question the way they live," he says.
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