Days after a wall of water and debris ripped through Nepal, Shanti Lamichhane sat on a fruit crate in the dirt where her village once stood, staring at what remained of her home.
Across Nepal’s flood disaster zone, survivors are returning to villages reduced to mud and debris, searching for belongings, documents and fragments of lives swept away in minutes.
Lamichhane said she was waiting for bulldozers to finish clearing the path so she could return.
“I want to retrieve a few things, but it is not just about that,” she told AFP. “All my memories are there too.”
The village of Dhunge, once home to roughly 150 families, now lies in ruins, reduced to a swampy expanse with an ominous rotting stench -- one of dozens of settlements obliterated by the Himalayan floods.
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Police officers carry identification tags for bodies placed in flower pots at the Devghat mass burial site for victims of the deadly flash floods and mudslides in Chitwan, Nepal. PHOTO: AFP, REUTERS
The US Geological Survey said the disaster on Wednesday morning on the China-Nepal border was caused by a glacial collapse, sending an icy torrent downstream driving boulders with its sheer force, cutting a swathe through Nepal from north to south.
“I want to retrieve a few things, but it is not just about that,” Lamichhane told AFP. “All my memories are there too.”
As of yesterday morning, figures from Nepal and China put the total number of missing over 3,000, with at least 752 bodies recovered.
For Rekha Devi Gosain, surviving the flood was only the first ordeal.
The Trishuli Bazaar resident lives with diabetes, high blood pressure and thyroid disease, conditions that require regular medication. When the flood swept away her home and four shops she owned, there was no time to save her medicines. Her vehicle, motorcycle and other belongings were also lost.
Now she and her family are living in a displaced-persons camp near Trishuli Hospital. But the hospital does not have the medicines she needs, reports The Kathmandu Post.
“My mother has to take her medicines regularly, but the hospital does not have them,” her son Raghubir said. “It has been three days since she was able to take them.”
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A member of the Nepal police carries a sack containing money and documents retrieved from a sludge-covered bank in Trishuli, Nepal’s Nuwakot district, yesterday. PHOTO: AFP, REUTERS
Forced to flee for their lives without time to take anything with them, many survivors are now returning to salvage whatever might remain -- or simply to see what became of what they once called home.
Santosh Adhikari was in Kathmandu when the deluge swept away his home in Dhunge. He returned three days later to find the house buried. “There was nothing,” he said.
Workers clearing silt from the flood-struck region say they occasionally come across personal belongings, including gold jewellery.
“But the debris is still knee-high and there is a stench in many places,” said Ayushman Kuinkel, a rescuer from the Nepal Scouts youth group. “One knows that there are also likely bodies under it.”
