- Umesh Shrestha/Rishikesh Dahal -
Bhaktapur district hospital authorities have told the couple their daughter needs to be shifted to another hospital, but they do not have the funds to shift her. ‘Please help us,’ Maiya pleaded with us when we visited Bhaktapur for this ground report. The Nepal Army, the Armed Police and Nepal Police were all involved in the rescue effort, but most houses had completely collapsed wherever we walked. Four houses west to where Maiya’s house once stood, four corpses were brought out. The houses that still stood were now naked, with photographs of their owners, kitchen utensils, sukuls and mats hanging from the debris.
A rescue personnel suddenly cried out from afar, ‘The house is shaking; be careful!’ We stepped aside carefully.
No one had been able to dig out all the bodies here. Most residents were worried whether the half-broken houses would fall on them; the rescue personnel were themselves in danger. Maiya had been repeatedly warned by them to move to a safer area, but she refused. Her 16-year-old daughter had just taken the SLC exam, and now she lay injured in the hospital. Maiya believes she will be able to recover some funds, something, anything from the debris that was once home. ‘Our jewellery, our money – everything is in here,’ she told us while digging, and all she could find was one dead chick!
Everything we saw told us one thing: after the quake, comes the epidemic. We walked on top of collapsed houses and buried motorcycles. A local youth told us, ‘There are even cars buried here. We could be walking on top of buried human beings too.’
Rescue and relief is itself a complicated task, and even more so here. An Army personnel asked us, ‘We don’t know what lies 50 m ahead of us. Can you zoom from your camera and tell us?’ pointing towards our drone – and this told us how rescue efforts had proceeded in this part of town.
Today is the third day of the earthquake that shook our country. The aftershocks have continued. The skies are dark, and there are hints of drizzle here and there. Yet, there were some who continued to bring out the broken utensils from their broken homes – they needed some plates to eat on, even though they had spent the past two nights in the open. The well that is their source of drinking water now has water that is visibly unclean, yet the youth fill that same water and take it to their shelters.
East of the Dattatreya temple, all homes have collapsed. Once upon a time, men would get lost in these lanes. Now, the lanes have themselves disappeared. Even rescue personnel don’t know whether the debris was once a house, or part of the road. Ram and Maiya both asked us: ‘Who will help us?’ We didn’t think the soldiers and the policemen, who had themselves been surviving on a diet of noodles and water, would be the answer. They are hungry themselves. We had no other answer to Ram and Maiya Baasi’s queries, except to say we could perhaps tell the government about their condition.
What we didn’t tell them was, we ourselves didn’t know what the government would do? Bhaktapur, where the maximum physical damage has occurred, questioned us throughout our visit. But we weren’t sure of our government’s response ourselves. All we could do was ask ourselves, does Nepal really have a government?
Translated by : Amish Raj Mulmi, Thanks to @prashantktm
