News of the earthquake in Nepal sends a shot of pain through the heart. Whether we keep track of events as they unfold or simply see the headlines in passing, a crisis like this is felt around the world.
The death toll from the 7.9 magnitude earthquake that struck Nepal on Saturday has risen to more than 2,500 [now at more than 4,000 as of 2pm Monday afternoon]. More than 5,000 people have been injured. Powerful aftershocks today between Kathmandu and Everest unleashed more avalanches in the Himalayas and caused panic in the capital, where hospital workers stretchered patients out into the street as it was too dangerous to treat them indoors.
Nepal confronts immediate need for food and emergency medical care. Groups like
Oxfam and
Doctors Without Borders already have feet on the ground there and are both effective and seasoned relief organizations. Please consider clicking on those links and donating to help Nepal in its time of dire need.
Each of us takes in news like this in our own, individual way. If you are connected to Nepal in any way, by birth or through friends or family, or even if you've simply visited, news of a horrific crisis like this wounds a part of you; you feel it more fully. Some people may have no connection whatsoever to Nepal but are still moved to tears, or to donate thousands of dollars. Others may hardly register the news. Some people feel more than others. Some people are big hearted and some, small minded. But at such distance we are all confronted by our own powerlessness to help. All we can do is send money, perhaps; many of us feel an extra twinge of giref knowing we cannot afford a financial contribution.
My heart aches further still knowing that in no time, the world will move on to other headlines. In a day or two, news of Nepal will slip off the front pages. Most news venues will not mention the earthquake again after this week. It's natural that we can't, and often do not wish to, keep our minds on a far-away tragedy for long. The press moves on to the next big thing.
What most of us never realize is that the repercussions of this type of event will be felt for a decade or more to come. This event will forever and dramatically alter the social and economic life of Nepal.
If you've ever experienced a natural disaster yourself, you cannot help but be reminded of the shocking events you yourself witnessed. I have. Several years ago I was conducting an agricultural training course for coffee farmers in Honduras. We had expected 150 attendees, but only a handful of farmers showed up. We were late starting class, waiting for more people to arrive, when someone came in and announced there was a hurricane forming on the North Coast. He was shaking as he spoke. The Pan-American Highway was closed by landslides. That's why no one was coming, he said, and the rest of us had better get home, as fast as we can. Home for me was an impossibility; all flights were indefintely cancelled. I was lucky to be in a sturdy concrete block hotel in a town inland, protected by mountains, ripped by high winds and torrential rain but left more or less undamaged, after it was over. I can still feel a humble and matter-of-fact sense of gratitude for that luck. Mitch was a class 5 hurricane that killed more than 10,000 people in Honduras alone.
I was lucky; I was able to leave. It took a couple of weeks for me to get out. The storm had brought down every bridge in the nation, the rivers were swollen and impossible to cross, and once you could travel, there were banditos at every crossroad, at first. Soon aid arrived, in the form of the Spanish military, and soon after, a Honduran friend from the Peace Corps came to take me back to the capital city. I had to wait a week there for an open flight. My friend let me stay in his home; there were no hotel rooms. The hotels left standing were all packed with news people and aid workers and visiting VIPs on hand for tragedy photo ops. I even saw Barbara Bush one day, being interviewed by a reporter on the patio by the pool at the Hotel Maya. Talk about surreal.
My experience surviving hurricane Mitch forever and dramatically altered me. I saw and felt things I cannot describe. I cleaned up blood and I held weeping strangers. What is striking to me is that I was also deeply affected by things I only heard about; almost more so than the blood and the faces that were in front of me. We heard that a man in Comayaguela shot an 8-year-old girl for her bucket of drinking water. We heard that cholera would arrive any day. We heard there were so many bodies in the rubble in Tegucigalpa, they had to stack them like cordwood in the Parque Central. The river had risen 25 feet in 8 hours in the capital city. I arrived there about a week after the hurricane struck. There were cars in the tops of trees.
I was lucky. I was able to leave. I was able to help hands-on while I was there, but I was also traumatized, and afraid, and far from home and family. I left as soon as I could. You cannot imagine how surreal it was to arrive back in the states to nothing much going on, to people who needed to ask me, where exactly is Honduras again?
When a devastating natural disaster occurs, we are shown shocking images of rubble and ruin, for a day or two, and we are told a number: the death toll. It wounds us, for the moment. Then most of us need to turn away and move on to other thoughts. But imagine for a moment, if you can, the impact of a lost child; of a lost husband or wife; of an elderly loved one that no one can find; of a small business you started 20 years ago that in one day is completely destroyed. People with a big heart will think of Nepal's immediate needs for food and medical supplies. Please, send a donation to Oxfam, or to Doctors Without Borders, or to other effective first-response aid organizations. Please leave suggestions for aid to Nepal in comments.
But what will happen over the course of the year, and the years, to come?
For weeks and in some places, for months, roads will be impassable. It may not occur to us here, but clearing roads and rebuilding bridges are the top priority. Large aid organizations and governments will do their best to reach those who need help: the injured; the cold; the homeless; the hungry.
They will be finding bodies for weeks to come.
Smaller nonprofits and church groups from all over the world will send clothing and canned goods and toys for children and more clothing and more canned goods and more toys and school supplies. Shipping containers will clog up the airport and border crossings, and will be hard to move from there. After hurricane Mitch, and I have heard after the earthquake in Haiti, whole shipping containers of clothing had to be put in the landfill because the roads were out, there was just no way to move them, and they just kept arriving and piling up. These donations can be truly helpful. But most of us should just send money, to a well-vetted group like Oxfam or MSF.
People will show up at the airport in Kathmandu in the days and weeks to come, well-meaning volunteers travelling on their own or in "missions," many of whom will not know the language, will have little or no training in any truly needed skill, will perhaps be robbed in Kathmandu or get lost or fall ill, and will ultimately need more assistance than they can possibly give.
Next the vultures will descend. American and British and Australian and German etc. expatriots of a certain ilk will fly to Kathmandu as soon as the airstrip is cleared of rubble, to buy up cheap land, and to find abandoned women who will work for food, while people are at their most desperate. "Strategic investors" will show up next, while they hold all the bargaining chips and Nepal is on its knees. Now is the time to build a new sweatshop, a new chemical factory, a new private prison, a new, exclusive resort hotel. If a commercial interest has had trouble in the past getting the permits and the land acquisitions it needs to do business in Nepal, it will now benevolently negotiate its own terms to give Nepal's economy a leg-up.
Multinational corporations will step in to offer products-as-aid swaps. For example, after Mitch, Monsanto offered Honduras a deal by which it donated agricultural chemicals, the Honduran government sold them to farmers, and then used the money raised for hurricane recovery projects. This effectively turns government employees into corporate sales reps. While I am not informed enough about the variety and extent of these types of arrangements to examine their cost/benefits, sincerity or shiftiness, the offers are sure to come, right when Nepal is in no position to refuse any offer it can get.
Through all this, every Nepalese person, from top-level diplomats to the poorest orphan child, is more traumatized than they've ever been in their lives. Many of them will develop PTSD and yet, they have to function, in the rubble, in their grief, without money to fix all the roads and buildings and infrastructure over an indefinite and painful period of recovery. In time, after this event is long over, they may still suffer bouts of PTSD, they will surely still grieve the loved ones they have lost, for who knows how long? For as long as it takes.
All this will happen as a back-drop to legitimate, coordinated and effective foriegn aid, along with true heroism and perserverance on the part of Nepalese people as they rebuild and recover. We see shocking pictures of rubble and ruin. We hear a number: the death toll. More than 4,000 people have died, and the survivors need our help now. Please, if you can afford it, make a donation now while their need is so great.
But after the dust has settled and the news people leave, after the first-response aid workers pull out, Nepal is still left traumatized. Nearly 31,000,000 Nepalese people's lives have just violently changed, forever. None of them will ever be the same. And next week, or next month, after we've all moved on to the next big thing, for years to come, this event and its aftermath will haunt them, for the rest of their lives.
Sat May 02, 2015 at 4:44 AM PT: As of May 1, 2015, the known death toll in Nepal from the earthquake on April 25 is at least 6,300, with more than twice that many injured.