Day 5: Bare Hands

1. Day began early at 6:15 AM when Kedar dai (deerwalk driver) arrived at my place. We helped drop the relief items gathered at my house to Nagarik Hospital where my sister is working.

2. We came back to office with huge cache of clothes. There are nice wearable clothes donated by people from Baneswor. We will handover to Sudan, DW employee, who is basically collecting clothes from all Deerwalkers.

3. At around 1:00 we left for relief work. Today we wanted to do some cleaning ( inspired by Rudra’s reference of Times of India news about Nepalese cleaning Bhaktapur with bare hands.) we bought around two dozen helmets, 25 pairs of gloves and some brooms. As you can see in the pictures the place was totally devastated and one of the person from department of archaeology was happy to see us arrive. He asked us that police is fully occupied with the task of taking the idols trapped inside. We were asked to neatly arrange the pieces of bricks and pile them up neatly so that they can be used for restoration process. We worked fro around 4 hours with intermittent breaks in between and left around 6:00 PM.

We arrived at office around 7:45 PM. This was physically tasking work but very much satisfying. We have just begun working on the video and two of the students, Bhawana ( class of 15 ) and Sumit Shrestha ( Class of 16 ) have told me that they will coordinate from home and send at least one video by midnight.

We spent around Rs 10,000 buying gloves, helmets ( very cheap ones ) and around Rs 3,500 ( part of the same Rs 10,000) on food.

Day 2: Picking up the Pieces

The Times of India article sort of highlights the problem Nepal currently is facing. Basically it is lack of young labor (three millions are out of country) and lack of tools to clean the debris. Not being able to dig bodies out of rubbles will creat a lot of problems soon – water pollution and contagious diseases.

Unfortunately everyone is focusing in distributing tents. Very few aid workers want to do difficult work of picking shovels and cleaning dirts. These millennials around the world are so worried about the issue they think is big — oh those poor people do not have breakfast; they do not have drinking water; they do not have rugs. There are enough water in villages. They figure it out. Give them cash.

Nepal’s picks up the pieces, with bare hands  

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Day #1: Lost homes, lost lives.

Some Relief for Gajuri and Kumpur villages in Dhading Susma Pant.

An employee of Deerwalk Services and a representative of Deerwalk Social Welfare Network visited Gajuri and Kumpur villages in Dhading, 85 km away from Kathmandu, and distributed a sum of NPR 60,000 to six persons who lost family members due to the earthquake. The recipients of the donation were Bhim Bahadur Shrestha (Lost wife), Kamala Tamang (Lost daughter), Rajendra Shrestha (Lost son and wife), Thuli Maya Tamang (Lost father-in-law), Subash Pariyar (Lost sister) and Ram Lal Shrestha (Lost daughter). Thirty four houses in the two villages have completely collapsed and the families are now homeless. The destruction and casualties in the neighboring villages is much more.