| Comforting the Dispossessed | ||||||||||||||
| By Li Wei-huang; translated by Tang Yau-yang; thotos by Hsiao Yiu-hwa | ||||||||||||||
The monsoon season in Nepal starts in June, often raining heavily in the afternoon and evening. The season lasts for at least three months, giving the nation 80 percent of its annual precipitation. The monsoon rains are received differently among different people in Nepal. This is rice planting season, so the rain is welcomed with open arms by farmers. But for foreign tourists and mountaineers, this is definitely not a good time for sightseeing. This year, in the aftermath of the earthquake, the rainy season was particularly hard for the Nepalese. According to the United Nations, more than 90,000 people were still living in tents over a month after the quake. Of those, 20,000 were in Kathmandu Valley alone. It is not comfortable to live in a tent, even on a good day. A rainy day just makes it worse. Besides, the earthquake had loosened the soil, and the heavy rains in June caused mudslides and more casualties in some mountain areas. Tourists dwindled after the disaster, but visitors of another kind—Tzu Chi volunteers—came in from countries including Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Canada, the Philippines, and China. They were in Nepal to distribute relief goods and to help with the construction of prefabricated classrooms.
A local resident remarked that the tremor had shattered his confidence in the integrity of local buildings. He had considered taking his family out of the country, but then he came across the volunteers, strangers from faraway places. They had to endure the horror of aftershocks alongside the local people, and they had to work in the capricious weather. They impressed him so much that instead of leaving the country, he joined their ranks.
The most coveted furniture Laxmi Shrestha, 29, her son, 3, and her niece had lived for two months in a tent of just 35 square feet. The earthquake destroyed the rental place that Laxmi had been living in, but her lease still held her responsible for the remaining rent payments: 6,000 rupees (US$59) a month. It didn’t matter that they were now living in a tent. Laxmi’s husband, the sole breadwinner in the family, was working in Saudi Arabia as a laborer. His work kept him in the Middle East, and he was still unable to return to check on his family. He used to work in Nepal, making less than 15,000 rupees (US$147) a month, a far cry from his current pay of at least 50,000 rupees in Saudi Arabia. In fact, the money earned by millions of Nepalese expatriate laborers in areas including the Middle East and Southeast Asia is the most important source of income for the nation. Getting out of the country to work is the fastest way for Nepalese to get out of poverty. Simply working hard and saving what they make in a foreign country for a few years may just be enough for a Nepalese to build a new house. Despite the financial advantages, there are hazards in working overseas. In 2014, one Nepalese worker died overseas every other day for work-related reasons or other causes. However, the earthquake aggravated the high unemployment in Nepal, and such negative statistics were expected to do little to dampen the zeal of droves of young Nepalese to borrow money and go abroad to work.
With their husbands working overseas, many women in the disaster zones had to take care of themselves and their families. Laxmi, for example, was looking for more plastic sheets to enlarge her current living space. Before she could obtain those, she was happy to receive two blankets made from recycled plastic bottles and two folding beds from Tzu Chi. The tent city she lived in did not drain well, so her tent tended to flood after a heavy rain. The Tzu Chi beds would come in particularly handy on such occasions. Tent residents loathed the rain. When it came, everyone scrambled to remove things susceptible to moisture, such as cushions and blankets, off the ground. One day after a distribution, Tzu Chi volunteers visited a few families and found that their mats and blankets were all wet. “We’re not afraid of the sun, but rain is a different story,” the tent residents said. The water made sleeping on the ground a most unpleasant thing to do. However, even if it didn’t rain, sleeping on hard surfaces was also uncomfortable. Doma Sherpa, 18, told visiting Tzu Chi volunteers that six families, or 29 people, all from remote mountain villages, lived in the same plastic tent with her. All of them, young or old, slept on the ground, and many of them felt sore all over. By the end of June 2015, Tzu Chi had given more than 5,600 folding beds to quake victims. Doma said that before Tzu Chi they had never encountered a charitable organization that gave out beds, which were just what they needed most at that time.
A tourism magnet without tourists The tent city Laxmi lived in was not far from one of the seven UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the Kathmandu Valley, the temple complex of Swayambhunath, also known as the Monkey Temple. More than 700 people from 160 families were living in this tent city. Some of them had been nearby residents, but others were monks, street people, beggars, or people from out of town. Penpa Norbu, one of the tent residents, had worked in the tourism industry before the earthquake. He served as a tour guide during the busy tourist season in March and April. However, his boss disappeared after the quake, leaving Penpa unpaid for his work in April. Tourism and money earned and remitted by Nepalese working overseas are the two main sources of income for the nation. Of the 28 million people in Nepal, a million work directly or indirectly in the tourism industry. The destruction of many tourist attractions in the earthquake almost certainly means that many of those people will lose their jobs. The Asian Development Bank has predicted that more Nepalese will fall below the poverty line. Thamel, a crowded, commercial neighborhood in Kathmandu, once boasted the heaviest concentration of tourists. But the proprietor of a bar there moaned that his business had fallen by 75 percent and that the nights of drinking and merriment were things of the past. Shops selling handicrafts and thangkas—Tibetan Buddhist paintings on cotton, or silk appliqué—are faring no better. With fewer patrons, shop owners are miserable. The nation needs to lure back tourists. Repairing historic monuments, making buildings safer, and restoring the confidence of tourists are challenges facing the Nepalese government. Penpa, having lost his job, volunteered to work with Tzu Chi volunteers. He had a good enough command of Chinese to interpret for them. He assisted them as they provided hot food, conducted free clinics, removed lice from quake victims’ heads, and held relief distributions. Unemployed, he could have chosen to be downcast, but instead he opted for a more active approach. He chose to help and become engaged with his community.
Outside Kathmandu There were quake victims far beyond Kathmandu, but those who lived in the capital seemed to have an easier time in the aftermath of the tremor than those who lived high in the mountains. Aid in the capital was much more concentrated and easily available than in less populous areas, such as remote mountain villages. One such village was Tatopani, in Sindhupalchowk District, a mountain region where more than 3,550 people died because of the quake. Many days after the disaster, aid still had not reached the village, which lay about 130 kilometers (80 miles) from the capital. Quake victims there had to be evacuated by helicopters or trucks to Bode in Bhaktapur, not far from Kathmandu. Nearly 90 tents in Bode housed a thousand people from over 200 families. Many of the people evacuated from Tatopani had the same last name—Sherpa—which reflected their ethnicity. Best known as porters and guides, the Sherpa people are noted for their ability to carry heavy loads at high altitudes. They are most at ease and at home in the openness of the mountains, but now they were stuck in the confines of crowded tents, a dozen or so of them crammed into a space of not much more than 140 square feet. Though their tent area offered a nice panoramic view of Kathmandu, the trapped Sherpa folks would have preferred to be home in Tatopani. However, many things there, including schools, medical clinics, and even roads, had been destroyed in the quake, and mudslides during the rainy season made it unsafe. There was no telling when they would be able to go home. Their prospects were uncertain at best. When Tzu Chi volunteers visited them, they found that some of them could converse in simple Chinese. It turned out that there is a Sino-Nepal Friendship Bridge that connects the Nepalese town of Tatopani and the Chinese town of Zhangmu in Shigatse, Tibet. Tatopani residents frequently go between the two towns to conduct business, so some of them know the Chinese language.
Passang Lama and his family ran a small restaurant in Zhangmu. He also provided interpretation services for merchants going back and forth between China and Nepal. He could speak Indian, Tibetan, Chinese, and English. After the earthquake, he and 20 people in his family were evacuated to Bode, but his mother, 65, refused to leave. “She said that even if she died, she would die in the mountains,” Passang told the volunteers. He added that besides his mother, some mobility-restricted and elderly people had also stayed behind. Passang had received four folding beds from Tzu Chi. He heard that it had taken the foundation a lot of effort to transport over 5,000 folding beds into Nepal and deliver them to various tent areas, hospitals and schools after the quake. He appreciated the kindness of the foundation, so he said that after the rainy season, when he returned to his hometown to rebuild, he would make sure to take the beds back with him, even though each one weighed 15 kilograms (33 pounds). Walking from a bus stop up the mountains back to his home would take at least four hours, but he was fine with that. He and his people were accustomed to heavy loads. “It’s no problem carrying even four beds at one time,” Passang said, smiling.
Everyone can give Tzu Chi volunteers have been in Nepal since April 28, 2015. As of July 1, nine delegations had been dispatched to the nation. They provided free clinics and distributed food, blankets, and folding beds. Now the relief mission has concluded its short-term initiatives and has started its medium- to long-term projects, which at present include the building of light-duty classrooms and homes. Reflecting on their interactions with Tzu Chi volunteers during this period, some quake victims were especially impressed by the origin of the foundation. Volunteers shared with them how the foundation had started in Taiwan with 30 housewives each putting 50 New Taiwan cents (then 1.2 U.S. cents) a day of their grocery money into bamboo coin banks for donations to help the needy. They pointed out that small donations, when pooled together, are able to do great things and that even people of the most modest means can become benefactors. Many Nepalese were thus encouraged to donate to aid the needy, be it one or ten rupees. In so doing, they transformed themselves from aid recipients to givers.
The concept of giving would have been unthinkable for some locals who were in the lower castes of Nepalese society if volunteers had not introduced it to them. So many of them had hard lives, and they were accustomed to receiving handouts. A member of the national legislature who had participated in Tzu Chi distributions and witnessed lower-caste Nepalese deposit their donations into Tzu Chi coin banks was truly amazed by what he saw. Tzu Chi volunteers respected the local social system in their host country while at the same time treating everyone equally without regard to their social standing, religious beliefs, or ethnicity. Dr. Sarvesh Gyawali, a Nepalese physician, observed that the volunteers helped needy elderly people who had no family to depend on, and they guided quake victims in washing elderly people and taking them to doctors. They also held a series of free clinics and aid distributions for two months. Though not entirely understanding why these strangers would take all the trouble to help them, many Nepalese were nevertheless moved by their kindness. Sarvesh was one of those so moved that he joined the foreigners in carrying out their benevolent deeds. Tzu Chi volunteers have helped the needy directly, but they have indirectly helped local volunteers by offering them a channel through which they can help their own compatriots. Penpa Norbu, Sarvesh Gyawali, and Nepalese volunteers like them have set a goal for themselves: “We’ll watch out for our own countrymen.” |
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