The Sunday News
. . . My time in Nepal just before the earthquake
Olipar Mabada-Moyo
When the 7,8 magnitude earthquake hit Nepal on Saturday 25 April 2015, in the afternoon leaving thousands dead, millions of people in the country would have been caught off guard. It was exactly 22 days since my group had left the capital city of Kathmandu for London after completing our different field research projects in the rural villages of Dhading District. The district is one of the worst hit with some of the villages reportedly 90 percent destroyed.
As the scale of the disaster brought by the earthquake unfolds in Nepal, one of the poorest countries in the world, my thoughts are not only with the friends that I have there and all the people affected, I also reflect on my 12 days spent in the country recently as part of a group doing research projects.
My project was focused on Disaster and Risk Management in rural Nepal. The reasons for choosing that angle was my realisation of how prone the country was to disasters. Coupled with the high population in Kathmandu, the poor building practices meant a lot of the buildings were not earthquake-proof. Infrastructure was already stretched with poor health systems and emergency services to cater for any major event. Though I was focusing on the rural areas, I connected with the capital city and realised that was where most of the problems were originating from.
Any disaster in Kathmandu valley, which has only two major roads that exit the city on either side, was likely to create a disaster in surrounding areas. The reasons being that the road that heads out of Kathmandu to villages such as Dhading District is also the major principal road into the country from India. The road which was, before the disaster, already struggling to cope with the high volume of haulage vehicles that brought supplies between the two countries is very narrow and in disrepair.
The latest reports indicated that it was impossible to use some parts of the road due to falling debris from the mountain sides.
My thoughts on the disaster go back to the Salang and Nalang villages where I did most of my interview research. The similarities to the rural villages in my home country, Zimbabwe, made me feel at home. The buildings consisted of mostly pole and dagga grass-thatched huts, just like in rural Zimbabwe villages.
One of the major highlights during my stay was when I heard Oliver Mutukudzi’s song Yeukai being played in one of Kathmandu’s restaurants where we were having dinner. Yeukai is a song off Oliver Mtukudzi’s and Black Spirits’ collection Maungira: The Early Years. As Nepal has very few black people, though I did not come across any during my time there, I was stunned to listen to one of Zimbabwe’s top musicians’ oldies being played in a top restaurant.
When I asked how they knew him, I was shocked to hear that his music was popular in some circles.
These fond memories are what I hold on as I try to come to grips with the possibility that the village houses we sat in, the roads we walked on are likely to have been destroyed. Most of the people I came across would either have lost their lives or have been injured in the disaster.
Accessibility was said to be proving difficult, four days after the disaster. Though aid was beginning to trickle in to some remote areas of the country, bad weather was hampering helicopter efforts to fly to these villages, making it difficult for them to be reached. Remote communities in mountainous areas such as the ones in the Dhading District are likely to be the most affected and most in need of help and assistance. However, these areas are least likely to receive the much needed aid due to the challenges of accessing them.
With this in mind, my thoughts go back to conversations I held with the villagers.
My heart bleeds as I look back on the interviews which I held with the elderly villagers, women and children, the vulnerable groups who were my target for the research. All my respondents made it clear that they were not prepared for any disaster happening as they had never had any training of any sort.
“We would like for the government or NGOs to train and assist us to understand what we are supposed to do in the event of a major disaster. At the moment all we know is that if the villages experience landslides or flooding, we just help each other to rebuild,” said 80-year-old Keshav Adhikari who lives with his wife, daughter-in-law and three grandchildren.
His three sons are among the hordes of men who had left Nepal to seek employment in neighbouring countries.
To make matters even worse, most of the men in the rural villages had migrated to countries such as Qatar, India and Saudi Arabia for better opportunities. Of the focus group of 12 women I interviewed, nine had their husbands absent.
These villages were difficult to reach before the disaster as we witnessed during my time there.
In the event of rains, the risks of flooding were very high leading to most mountainous roads being closed off to buses. I experienced this on my return journey as we had to be transported in different 4×4 vehicles from our base camp to the waiting bus about eight kilometres away. This, just following some showers which had lasted the whole day.
I managed to have an interview with an expert on disaster management in the country. Professor Gangalal Tuladhar, chairman of the Himalayan Conservation Group and a Member of Constituent Assembly in Nepal, who is also the Chairman of the National Pressure Group for Disaster Risk Management, was our host. Professor Taludhar’s PhD research thesis was based on disaster risk management in the country and he is regarded highly within the government.
On chatting to him, I discovered that Nepal had in the past 12 years experienced hundreds of disasters such as landslides and flooding, with thousands of lives lost. More than 105 small earthquakes had also been experienced during that period. This big earthquake was a disaster waiting to happen. Experts had on many occasions given warnings on the likelihood of a major earthquake hitting the nation.
The worst feared place was the capital city, Kathmandu, built to cater for 1,2 million people but now with more than four million people registered as citizens. As an earthquake-prone country, the last major one having been in 1934, there was a high chance of the next major one happening after 70 years.
However, as Professor Taludhar put it, planners had no idea what would happen, should there be a disaster.
“Maybe in a few years, but at the moment, there are no plans except to offer disaster preparedness training in schools and some community-based disaster preparedness workshops.”
This was on April 1 during a farewell dinner for our field group. The problem was that these workshops had not been rolled out across the country. Exactly 25 days later, disaster struck.
At the time of writing, I had just been to a fundraising meeting with some NGOs from Nepal who are based in the UK and my field group on how best we could offer our support towards the disaster victims especially in the villages we had visited.
The author,Olipar Mabada-Moyo, was in Nepal as part of her post-graduate studies.
