Author Archives: All The Pieces

Earthquake, Nepal Life, Oral Health Care Project, Work

Discovery of Shelter Kids

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Slide24Lamjung district borders Kaski immediately to the East, and shares its other border with the district of Gorkha. The Lamjung/Gorkha border was the epicenter of the April 25 earthquake.

At 7:30pm last night, Aamod and I made a plan to drive out to Lamjung today and meet with the district government. We wanted to find out what plans the government has for transitional housing and who else is working on it.

As per Nepal style this plan was finalized only late yesterday evening. My job was to type up two official letters for the two government offices we’d be visiting. So got that done by 11pm, and I was planning to print the letters out in the morning, but at 6:15am my phone rang. Aamod had realized the letters should be in Nepali, and I can’t read or write in Nepali. So I emailed the English version to him and went back to sleep. Aamod translated the letter and emailed it to Neha, who was home sick, but nevertheless braved out to her office, but the electricity wasn’t working at her office, so she texted to say I should meet her at a cyber on my way out of town. But when I arrived at the cyber Neha was only just opening up Aamod’s translation, and there were problems with the computer and network and printer and….1.5 hours later, we printed two copies of the letter.

By the time we finally left Pokhara it was 1:45 instead of 11:30. We picked up Aamod in Damauli, and in Dhumre, turned off the east-west road between Kathmandu and Pokhara, and headed northward toward Lamjung. It began to rain.

As soon as we started toward Lamjung we found ourselves trundling along behind a line of relief trucks covered in orange tarps. Once we passed them, I watched the blooming green hills rolling by on the other side of a lush valley and was soothed at being on the road, moving toward some kind of answer, however small, after weeks of anxiety. The flying scenery seemed to catch some speeding thing in my mind and race alongside it, leaving me momentarily still.

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The road went on and on. It began to feel very late. And in the front seat, Aamod was sifting through the letters Neha and I had printed out in the morning. There were some mistakes.

Yep. Mistakes. Not kidding.

Now I personally felt that if we had letters with stamps on them, they would surely fulfill procedure. But one must remember that I couldn’t read these letters, so I might have been biased.   On the other hand, it was starting to feel like we were never actually going to arrive at our meeting with the District Health Office, and government offices aren’t known for staying open past working hours.

We pulled in to Besishar no earlier than 3:45pm. And Aamod, God bless him, had become committed to finding a place to reprint these blasted letters. We curbed up at a cyber, shoved my pen drive in the computer, Aamod hastily typed in some changes, the cyber owner went to click print…and the power promptly went out.

No reason. This wasn’t a scheduled outage for load shedding. Just good luck.

We wait for a minute to see if the power will come back on. It doesn’t. We leave and look for another cyber. Eventually we find a one and now I am running between the cyber and the taxi with Aamod’s bag while people in the street in Besishar are looking at the tall foreigner sprinting down the road in flip flops with Aamod’s backpack. The revised letters are finally delivered like manna from a printer in to Aamod’s hands. He gently tri-folds them, slides them in to some envelopes, and stamps our organization logo on the front. We jump back in the cab and drive to the District Health Office in Besishar.

Now it’s well after 4:15. As we pull in, the sun comes out, and suddenly it seems early in the day again and things are possible.

We sat down on a couch, and Aamod reached in to his backpack, pulled out an envelope, and handed it formally across the desk to the District Health Officer. This immediately made me want to start giggling like a six year old, because the letter had just gone IN the envelope about five minutes earlier.

Next, we waited quietly and watched the officer read the letter. This is the protocol. The District Health Officer was an affable guy and he took us to the office of the Chief District Officer, the head official of Lamjung. Where, of course, Aamod placed the second letter on the second desk, to be read in silence while we watched.

Just as we began talking at long last, with the late afternoon sun getting lower in the window, we were interrupted by the entrance of an animated employee, who strode in with a huge file and thunked it on the CDO’s desk. He then launched in to a torrential briefing for the Chief District Officer on housing.

He turned out to be the guy in charge of shelter coordination in Lamjung.

And this is how Aamod and I got an up-to-the-minute report on transitional housing in Lamjung District. It was PURE LUCK. If it hadn’t taken us 2.5 hours longer than planned to get to Lamjung, we would have missed this entire interaction. The man’s name was Pradeep Khanal, and we are going to be best friends.

Pradeep (and indeed, much of our afternoon in Lamjung) countered all the negative stereotypes of Nepal’s apathetic, dysfunctional bureaucracy.  He provided us a list of the six big agencies doing shelter in Lamjung, updated at a meeting just that morning, and directed us to villages not yet adopted by the large iNGOs doing housing. We looked at drawings of government shelter models and I was surprised to realize I could quickly tell which had advantages and why; which were too resource-heavy or laborious to construct except as a permanent house.

This surprised me as much as when I watched a Hindi film with the boys last winter, and discovered I understand a good bit of Hindi.  With no background in construction, the only reason I could interpret all this information from housing drawings is because I’ve lived in a rural house for 12 years, and done things like wood collecting and carrying heavy loads up long distances. Looking at these models, I had a pretty realistic sense of how the proposed spaces would be used daily, of what would be involved in constructing them, and how the result and effort required would compare to a permanent house.

See, you just never know when your niche specialty is going to turn out to be JUST THE THING, right?

We also learned that just that day the government had finalized shelter kits (or Shelter Kids, as the documents charmingly call them) which include tin, nails etc., for each family that needs to rebuild. The government will provide the raw materials, and let people figure out how to use them.

I asked if the government will still provide these kits in places where NGOs had taken on housing projects. They said no – no reason to duplicate money and materials.

Aamod and I scoured a list of districts, numbers of damaged houses, and a huge map on the wall of Lamjung district. We can only afford 100 – 200 housing structures; was there any place where that was the right number? The CDO asked us to please consider offering at least 300 houses, to properly cover a single village.

Suddenly something occurred to me. It was actually completely obvious.

When we do dental care, one of the most difficult parts of our job is motivating the government to collaborate on investment. But this government is already investing. Why would we steal their thunder?  If we can simply fill in around the government, we can use our resources to supplement and improve their plan instead of replicating it. What’s more, one of the major lessons from Haiti was that the NGO industry that usurped the government was a giant debacle, essentially displacing governance to outsiders and leaving public systems powerless.

“Sir,” I asked the District Health Officer, “how are you going to deliver these rebuilding kits?”

IMG_4968He said the district government would bring housing kits to the village governments for distribution. I can tell you right now that we’ll be reading stories about how housing kits didn’t reach people who needed them. You know how easy it is to carry hundreds of bundles of tin and nails around in the hills of Lamjung and Gorkha?  And what’s more, the government is under pressure to show transparency, so distribution of government aid is already being hampered by a requirement that people have identity cards.  Which obviously, have mostly been buried under rubble.

“I was wondering,” I said, “If we were to provide manpower for distribution and building, would the government still be able to provide materials?”

The DHO turned to the CDO sitting behind the desk.

“She’s wondering if we can provide materials in their working areas, if they help with distribution and building.” Is it possible nobody else has asked this question?

“Sure, of course,” said the CDO.  As if this wasn’t a miracle. If it was that easy with dental clinics…

Aamod and I practically bounced back out to the taxi. There are countless advantages to channeling the resources of the government to an efficient, people-centered result, over acting independently. One is supporting the government, which, for all its problems, is in charge of the welfare of its people. And instead of buying tin sheets and nails, we can use our relief fund to think about quality of life. Instead of roofs, we can think about walls. Instead of crisis shelter, we can learn about design that can be transferred over time to permanent housing.

Also, we have communities in our own working areas in Kaski and Parbat, where the government currently has no plans to offer housing kits, asking for tents. Instead of using funds on tents, we can reallocate the money saved in Lamjung to mimic the housing kits in our villages, see how people use them, and learn how to supplement supplies and design ideas.

On the way home we talked for 3 hours nonstop about ideas that seemed accessible now: creating day-labor employment, paired-village building, little things that could be easily discounted or added to make all the difference. Out the window, the hills rolled by in reverse, and night fell.

“I was thinking,” I said from the back seat, “about this idea of a safe box for valuables. What do you think?”

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Aamaa, Earthquake, Family, Kaskikot, Nepal Life, Reflections, Work

Dreaming of Safe Boxes

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With a lot of thought going in to our current Kaski Oral Health working areas, we’ve also had quite a bit of discussion about whether, how, and why to get involved in a village closer to the center of the damage, where a higher percentage of houses – in some cases up to 90% – have been destroyed.  Lamjung, the next district over, shares its eastern border with Gorkha and this border was the epicenter of the earthquake.

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With all this going on, I’m gradually appreciating how much experience we’ve developed in community-centered design that incorporates multiple systems and people to address even a very specific issue like dental care.  I think that if we can work in one of these districts, we should because we can.  I also feel it’s important to have local, grassroots organizations involved and setting examples in the places where large agencies are doing a lot of work.

As I ponder how we can turn this expertise in to something useful for earthquake-relief (and I think we should have a moment of appreciation for the activity of pondering about turning expertise in rural South-Asian dental care in to earthquake relief), it seems the first step is to be working with a single community in a defined area.

I am hoping that if we can locate a community that’s a manageable size for our capacity and funds, we can at least do a really good job of using a community-centered approach to set up transitional housing in one Lamjung village, with the goal of creating an example to be copied by agencies with more resources. Once we see how that goes, we can decide if it makes sense to bring in another layer in the same community, such as the counseling element that Dr. Aung from the WHO suggested.

I’ve looked at four types of housing so far: Kiran’s tunnel, a simple tin tunnel, something called earthbag building that uses sacks of dirt and can be made to look very much like a traditional home – and then there’s the option of simply providing people with a corrugated tin and some other materials and letting them have at it.

All this was kicking around in my head the other night when I was in Kaski with Aamaa. While we were having dinner a crazy lightening storm started—the kind that’s more like a constant flickering than separate strikes of lightening. There is a lingering sense of nature’s awfulness in the air and everything feels foreboding, even the normal, dramatic patters of weather typical to this season. As we turned in for the night, it began to pour.

P1070133Lying in bed between the sturdy earth walls of our house, listening to rain clang on the tin roof, is one of my places of greatest serenity. This is my favorite way in the world to fall asleep, and my favorite way to wake up. You can hear the entire the distance from the ground under you up to the sky, but all the noise and space are close and balanced and soft like a blanket.

In my half-dream state, I found myself thinking about people lying in their makeshift shelters, with doors of plastic sheets or thin bamboo or synthetic, brightly-colored things, easily torn down or penetrated. Aamaa walks around all day with a key to this house hanging around her neck. She even sleeps with it.  It suddenly seemed like a great indignity to have no door to close, nothing to lock up, no single space to block out the rest of the unknown and uncaring world.

Not to mention the practicalities. Where are people storing any precious photos of grandparents extracted from the rubble? The few pieces of jewelry or any cash they are lucky enough to still possess? You’d have to walk around with all of this stuff on you all the time.

IMG_1719My mind reached about, searching for something that people could shut tightly, a safe box that can’t be stolen when there are no bolts or securities anywhere. Into my head floated a picture of a locked metal container with a pipe welded perpendicularly to the bottom, and a wide plate attached to the other end, like an upside down T. You could dig a hole, place the box in the ground so that the top of the T rests on the bottom of the hole, and then fill the hole in so only about half the box is above ground with the top accessible. There would be no way to lift this locked, anchored box, so if someone wanted to steal it they’d have to surreptitiously dig up the entire affair inside your tarp-house and then sneak out with a large metal T sticking out from under their shirt. Which, if they could pull it off, AND get your lock undone, then hats off to them.  Because the key would be on a string around your neck.

I fell asleep to the sound of the rain, wondering if we could produce a safe like that.

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Earthquake, Family, Gaky's Light, Nepal Life, Oral Health Care Project, Work

Dental Care Anyway

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IMG_4898I’ve been in Pokhara for about five days now. All the usual activities – Saturday workshop with our Gaky’s Light Fellows and Asmita’s 18th birthday party at the community house, where I continued practicing my henna tattooing skills on all the girls…

Last week Kaski Oral Health completed this year’s teacher trainings in each of the three villages that launched over the winter. This is where one teacher from each school, who is called an Oral Health Coordinator, learns to conduct a daily brushing program and also do oral health education throughout the school year. We had to postpone our OHC trainings because the earthquake hit right when they were originally scheduled, and when we did hold them, we had to think about how to keep oral health care relevant in the context that teachers are now facing.

IMG_0525There are approximately 129 damaged homes in our working areas, some of which are unlivable, and just outside of a village where we work in Parbat, a nearby area has experienced even more extensive damage and our dental technician has asked us to help. So we’ve made one trip out there, and we’re considering how to approach another. About 13 schools need some or total rebuilding in our 10 villages. All these realities must be acknowledged as we continue trying to advance the work we’ve been doing in oral healthcare over the last eight years.

One widespread issue is that shelter aid has been largely limited to people whose houses were totally destroyed. For thousands and thousands of people whose homes are standing but too dangerous to live in, significantly less help has been available – by not receiving tent distribution, for example, and that’s where organizations like ours filled in. Going forward, the government is compensating only $250 per damaged house, compared to the $1000 that will go to families whose houses are flattened. Then again, everybody will need to rebuild from scratch, and even a simple village home costs closer to $3000.

All of this is why I want to start pulling back from using our limited relief funds for tents and start focusing on transitional housing that will last people for the length of time needed to rebuild.

On a tangential topic, we’ve outgrown our one-room office, and leased a new space that is currently totally empty, which is both exciting and intimidating. So in between scouring the internet and Facebook for examples of tunnel shelters and super-adobe shelters and shelters that reuse tarps, I am also turning over possible arrangements of the sunny new rooms of our office, which have yet to be set up as our home.

I took a detour from dreams of shelters and offices yesterday to spend the morning with our field officer, Dilmaya, at Deurali Primary School in Kaskikot. This school is just five minutes from my house, and it is where Didi and Bishnu attended grades 1-5. I have known the teachers there for twelve years. For about 4-5 years, Deurali school ran a daily brushing program we’d helped them start, but it eventually petered out. Their Oral Health Coordinator, a really sweet young woman named Chandra, had asked me last winter to help them restart it.

So Dilmaya came up to Kaskikot with her backpack full of brushes and paste, had lunch with me and Aamaa at home, and then we went to Deurali school and sat down with all the teachers in the office. Govinda also joined us – he is one of the founders of KOHCP and was the team leader in Kaskikot for the six years the program ran there.

IMG_0577I was amazed when the headmaster pulled a notebook out of the cabinet. He had kept a log, which started in 2011, of each purchase or donation of brushes and paste, each poetry project or dance performance the school had held to advocate for oral health care. We discussed the school’s plans for future sustainability as our contribution declines next year, a plan we require. The teachers presented each of us with kata scarves, a traditional way to welcome and honor guests.

You all may or may not remember that when we tried to hand-over Kaskikot’s KOHCP programs and clinic in 2012, the project collapsed due to personal interests among government officials (a soap opera that, for better or worse, was covered in a 2013 Washington Post story). So it’s a bitter pill I live with that in order to keep this program growing and developing elsewhere, I had to be willing to watch it fail in my home village. And since then, we have since expanded to 7 clinics in 10 other villages that cover an area of about 50,000 people.

Nevertheless, sitting in this tiny school in my back yard, which has no more than 35 young students, and seeing the enthusiasm and sincerity of the teachers to restart their brushing program, was just awesome. We were all so happy with each other that it was basically one big appreciation fest.

Now that we have field officers, we offered to have Dilmaya come back and run a workshop for the teachers on oral health education, where she can teach the art, math and game activities we do with OHCs now to help them promote oral health care in addition to doing the brushing program.  Their teacher took the new brushes and paste and ran the day’s brushing program.

So that was a nice little pick-me up. Now, back to Pokhara to look at earthbag building.

Aidan and Pascal, Around Town, Didi and Bishnu, Earthquake, Family, Nepal Life, Oral Health Care Project, Reflections

Looking for Shelter

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I woke up tired today. Partly because I stayed up so late writing, and partly because we’re all sleeping on the floor of the living room by the front door.

But I had an interesting morning. I made my way to an outdoor lot full of incomprehensible discarded piles of things, where Dr. Kiran’s group, SXJ-95, was meeting about their transitional housing unit, a clean white bubble sitting in the middle of the mess. It was really fascinating to hear how they’d developed this design by researching other units, most notably the post-earthquake shelters used in Pakistan. I’m going to save the details, because I hope to produce a quick audio slideshow about it.

IMG_8773While I was there watching, two government officials came to inspect the prototype, and discuss minor modifications so that it could be used to replace a destroyed Health Post in rural Lalitpur. By the time we left, the builders were getting back to work on the second unit, with a plan to drive the pieces to Lalitpur and set up a shelter within two days.

This has really got me thinking about transitional housing as a possible use for our relief fund. I plan to either donate it to a group doing really valuable work in rural areas, or finding a project that we can do well. It has been such a chore to procure and deliver tents – which are getting more and more expensive – and it’s frustrating to know that, while obviously better for people than no tent, this is such a short-term improvement. Plus, each time a transitional shelter is placed in the field, it’s an opportunity to get feedback and improve the design, so if we can collaborate with a group like Kiran’s, perhaps we could contribute to the larger good in terms of research and design.

SXJ 95’s unit costs about $500, but they put a lot of thought in to user feel and aesthetics. On one hand, this means we could potentially offer rural families upgraded transitional housing; on the other, we couldn’t afford very many. I plan to keep in touch with Kiran about their test in Lalitpur and maybe see if this design could be used for another health post or school classroom. Here’s a recent article by Gordon Brown, former Prime Minister of the UK, on the importance of reinstating schooling for basic child safety and welfare (sorry for the sensationalist title).

I left the crazy stuff lot with its shelter bubble, and my next stop was the Ministry of Health and Population. The World Health Organization holds bi-weekly meetings in collaboration with the Nepali government, where all of the major players in town for recovery – large iNGOs, foreign medical teams, etc. – come to share information. These meetings are divided in to clusters, such as Health, Communications, Shelter, Security etc. I went to the Health Cluster meeting.

This is the opposite end of the spectrum from the WHR’s and SXJ-95’s of the relief effort. Kiran dropped me off, and I hopped out of his car into a parking lot full of oversized, logo’ed SUVs. I made my way to a packed meeting hall – probably close to 100 people of various nationalities. I sat in the back of the room and scanned the emblazoned vests in front of me: World Vision, Save the Children, AmeriCares, International Medical Corps. Japan, Switzerland, Canada…and then in the back, some straggling foreigners like me, probably there to get the lay of the land.

IMG_8789The meeting was led by the WHO rep to Nepal, Dr. Lin Aung, with government representatives in attendance. I had missed the first 20 minutes or so, but listened to some updated figures, and then attendees were invited to share what they’d been doing. That part seemed a little odd. They would announce the name of an area – “Sindhupalchowk?” and then various groups would stand up and say what they had been doing in Sindhupalchowk since the last meeting. It was more information-sharing than strategizing – but maybe these groups have other methods that they are using for truly coordinating their efforts.

After the meeting, I went to go talk to Dr. Aung. Ironically, I was trying to meet him all winter because I thought he’d be a good person to know for Kaski Oral Health, and I was never able to get in touch since I’m rarely in Kathmandu. But when I introduced myself, he turned out to be a very friendly and genuine guy. He gave me five minutes of undivided attention, even though another half dozen people were waiting to talk with him.

I asked what he thought a small organization like mine in Pokhara could do to pitch in to the relief effort. Like others, he said we should be thinking medium and long-term, which is where multilateral agencies aren’t nearly as agile or embedded. He said that with our community ties, we should focus on counseling and psycho-emotional support.

I said, “We don’t know anything about post-disaster counseling.”

He said that the psycho-social cluster is developing protocols for this kind of thing and gave me an email address where I could access this info.

All of which tells me that, for better or worse, coordination is almost completely at the discretion of aid providers. I think – and you could argue that this makes sense under the circumstances –things are really set up such that, in order to find the best way to participate, organizations large and small have to make a point of reaching out.

I’m not sure why I’m a little hung up on this. But I suppose we’d like to think in a humanitarian crisis of this nature, somebody has the answers and can tell us all what to do – and maybe somebody should know. But the basic fact remains that everybody is winging it to some degree, and I can’t argue this is exactly anyone’s fault. It seems like it’s really one of the cruelties of the whole situation.  The real blame lies in the injustices of the past that led to poverty and bad planning and lack of security, not in the present where nature took over. In any case, it seems like coordinated strategic planning is largely a matter of self-discipline.

Before I left for Pokhara, I went to visit a friend who is the CEO of Teach for Nepal. Most of their teaching fellows were there for a day of counseling with social workers from Israel, experienced at working with disaster trauma. I learned that one of TFN’s young teachers perished in Sindhupalchowk. The day of the earthquake, my friend and her husband were unable to call a helicopter to Sindhupalchowk, so they drove 5 hours to get there and dig through rubble themselves.  It was out there that they realized they’d actually lost her.  Now they are left with continued aftershocks and their other 89 fellows to send back out to their schools.

Everyone is spinning.

By the time I got on the plane to Pokhara I admit I felt pretty down. I had also spoken with my friend’s husband who has worked on a shelter that costs just $100 and might be a good option – we could potentially provide an entire community of about 100 -200 families with safer housing while they rebuild. But everyone is so hurt, psychologically and otherwise. The scale of rebuilding that’s needed is really hard for me to wrap my head around. I really just wanted all of it to go away.

At the airport in Pokhara, Prem was waiting for me. And as we crossed the road, Aidan was on the other side sticking his head out the taxi window, shiny as a stamp, his cheeky toothless grin lighting up the whole city. Pascal insisted on sitting in my lap for the seven-minute car ride. I gave them some super-sized squirt guns and unloaded the rest of a bag of Reese’s Pieces.

We went out into the late afternoon Pokhara sun, and walked to a plot of land up on a hill, where leveling strings are stretched across deep foundation holes in the ground. Prem and Didi are building their first house.

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For anyone wishing to support Dr. Kiran’s group, SXJ-95, you can do so here: http://bit.ly/1ReQ8gj.

Teach for Nepal is providing relief in their working areas, and will have a special focus on rebuilding schools. You can support them at http://nepalrelief.teachfornepal.org.

Around Town, Between Worlds, Nepal Life, Reflections

A New World

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It was nighttime as we flew in yesterday, so I couldn’t watch the terraced hills coming in closer and giving way to Kathmandu’s gritty buildings. Staring at the city lights flickering in the vast darkness below, I felt a wave of sadness. I couldn’t shake the feeling of arriving in a foreign land and it made me feel like a foreigner to myself.

The normally quiet tarmac at the airport was scattered with a handful of helicopters and few gigantic cargo planes with their hatches open. And in a way that only Nepal can do, it seemed that someone had made an effort to spruce up the airport for an onslaught of international visitors: a new routing through the arrival area, which wound past a recently installed station where a vinyl banner reading HEALTH DESK had been mounted. A large sign announced that anyone having recently come from Africa was required to stop at the Health Desk for processing, and behind it, an airport official was tinkering with his iPhone. We all shuffled past him, to the main arrival terminal, where the computers weren’t working.

IMG_4863I was one of only about five foreigners waiting for a visa, which was new. And the baggage scanner that was previously set up at the airport exit was gone, probably to make way for a more official exit procedure. But to either side of the revised exit procedure were piles and piles of packages. I took a photo of a stack of boxes addressed to a hospital; it did not look anyone was in much of a hurry to get these parcels distributed.

Following Tuesday’s second earthquake, everyone is taking precautions again. On the cab ride from the airport, I didn’t see many damaged buildings, but people everywhere had tents up outside along the road. I stayed with a friend and the whole family slept on mattresses in the living room, right by the front door, which was left unlatched.  That’s where we are again tonight.

IMG_8714Today I spent the day getting a taste of local relief efforts, and it validated my early suspicion that the energy and creativity of locals can’t be dismissed. My friend Dr. Kiran Awasthi, who has trained all our dental technicians through his organization, has been furiously working with a group of high school classmates to distribute sanitation materials that will help prevent disease outbreaks. His connections through the private sector and health ministry have allowed his group to become a trustworthy distributor of hard-to-find supplies. They’ve also researched, designed and built a temporary housing unit in just two weeks, and they’ve tried it out in some areas already. Obviously the government will ultimately have to take the lead on a large scale, but groups like this are doing a huge amount to help get there more quickly.

My second stop was with a group called Women for Human Rights. Before the earthquake, I had planned to visit them on this trip to do an interview for a radio story I am producing about young widows in Nepal (as part of a series on migrant labor called Between Worlds…but that’s another story!). Like everyone, Women for Human Rights is also doing what they can towards relief, in this case for women especially. So I interviewed their founder about their aid efforts, and then went to a shelter they’ve set up for young mothers and children. It is a large canopy at one of the tent cities in Narayanchaur, at the center of a gigantic grassy mound in the middle of a traffic circle. I interviewed a 22 year old girl whose baby was three weeks old when the earthquake struck. When I asked the kids what they thought of spending their days lounging and playing in the hot sun at the camp, a twelve year old girl chirped: “It’s fun!”

I know that the government and army are making major efforts, and personally I believe very strongly that the government should be viewed with high expectations, tasked with responsibility, and held accountable.  But that said, there is huge distrust among the people of Nepal and the international community about the government’s ability to distribute aid, much less rebuilding, quickly or equitably.  There are still swaths of the hillsides where people have lost everything, suffered injuries and death, and received NO AID.  I couldn’t help noticing that when I walked past the police station, about two dozen officers were hard at work breaking, organizing and laying bricks – rebuilding the wall of their own compound.

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So that was a pretty long day. I already have hours of tape to sort through and tomorrow will bring a whole new chapter of stories before I fly to Pokhara at 3:00. I’ll be glad to get out of Kathmandu – about 70,000 people have left the city since the second earthquake on Tuesday.

Nepal has always shown me a graceful, practical relationship with nature and its whims. But everything feels wrong. Twice today I was in the middle of a conversation with someone who suddenly stopped and said, “Is that an aftershock?” and I couldn’t even feel any shaking. Everyone is on a razor’s edge. People keep telling me, “Things were getting back to normal,” when talking about the second earthquake, which really tells you something, because things were definitely not normal last Tuesday morning. But the second time seems to have redefined “not normal.” It’s as if now the injury of this event is not yet quantified – the sensation isn’t that something terrible happened, but that it is happening, and the final damage is unknown.   As long as the cost remains pending, the reckoning is impossible. You can’t mourn much less rebuild something that is still breaking apart. Everyone is just waiting, even as they run around providing aid to each other.

I will be glad to get to Pokhara tomorrow, but I think this month is going to be as strange and unsettling as expected. My mind is racing with ideas for how to make the best possible use of the $14,000+ we raised for aid, and it is good know that we have the ability to do something, or to provide significant support to someone doing something effective and under-funded. One idea I’m thinking about is collaborating with Kiran or a similar group working on temporary housing. Tomorrow, I am going to get an overview of how the big aid is working.

But I will write about that tomorrow!

Gaky's Light, Nepal Life, Oral Health Care Project, Work

A Start

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Dear friends,

I wanted to provide an update on our progress in Nepal.  Each day of the past week has felt like a lifetime, thoughts racing so fast, then slowing down to a halt, then picking up again like a twirl of spinning leaves.  Some days just when I’m too sleepy to stay up, someone in Nepal or California or India comes on Skype and we talk till 2am, and then I dream about it and wake up in Hartford.

Screen Shot 2015-05-13 at 11.47.03 PMOur Kaski Oral Health Care working areas have sustained property damage to homes and schools, but no human loss of life as far as I know.  But we have been able to work with our dental teams (the three locals that run each village clinic) and use our relationships with local governments in these areas to quickly find out what’s going on there and offer help.  Earlier this week, thanks to funding from another donor (thank you, GNE)! our board members worked with KOHCP’s dental teams to distribute tents for about 42 families sleeping outside in their respective villages.  In the district of Parbat, our dental technician called seeking help for a neighboring village where another 40 families are sleeping outside their destroyed homes.

Since I launched our relief fund on monday, it has been amazing – $5200 poured in from people on both continents in less than a week.  This morning, we agreed to spend $3500 of it on tents for the 40 homeless families in Parbat.  It’s a start.

We’ve all agreed that order to get back to our goal of building dental care, we have to do our part to help stabilize the immediate trauma in the places we work.  In fact, I’m realizing that with our localized knowledge of these villages, we’re as well set up to do so as anyone is.  And that’s been the really incredible lesson of this week: for locally-based organizations like mine, nobody else is coming while we wait.  There are just too many places to get to, and the aid that’s available to the people we work with is us.  Luckily, Eva Nepal’s working areas did not suffer on nearly the scale of many other places.

I’m also talking with friends making trips out to the epicenter in Gorkha, where the devastation is incomprehensible, and all hands are needed.  I know this is hard to really believe – by believe I mean, to really picture what this would be like – but some of these remote places have not been reached yet. People have been stranded for a week with injuries and no belongings or shelter or food. So everybody is needed throw in their shoulder the best way they can, or invent a way, and the Red Cross seems to have stepped in to provide coordination, wisely making use of the tremendous energy being delivered by locals.  In the upcoming week, I will try to get a better understanding how we can help out there as well.

As for me, I have reconnected with a wonderful network of people in this country who also consider Nepal a second home – in many cases researchers who spent years devoted to specific communities or issues on Nepal.  People who I met at conferences at some other time, followed generally on Facebook, and are suddenly my go-to clergy for all the pressing questions and worries in my life.  We end up chatting late at night on Facebook about the longing to be nearby to help vs. the unhelpfulness of it, sharing articles and tips, asking for contacts and help moving information around.  Many of the articles being passed around online are written or commented on by people within this tight, quirky circle of people whose hearts have roots in this country and culture.

There is one moment from this week that will always stick with me.  The morning after the earthquake, I was Facebook chatting with our graduated fellow, 18-year old Santosh, who just this spring moved to Kathmandu to get his Bachelor’s degree.  It was a big deal, coming to the capital from little Pokhara, and we helped him find a cool internship at a software development company to pay for his living expenses.  He was describing the scene, the event – “Oh my god, what is that, so scaring” – where he slept, what he’d been doing, and I was trying to get him to take photos to publish in Youth Journalism International.  We were getting ready to sign off when Santosh typed in to the little blank white screen…

 

is this earthquake in america also??

 

Love,
Laura

To donate to Eva Nepal’s Earthquake Relief Fund, click here.

Family, Nepal Life

Our Future After the Earthquake

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Dear friends and family,
First, thank you with all my heart for the flood of emails, texts, calls, posts, and chats that have blown up my phone and computer in the last 72 hours.  It’s true that the darkest moments show us the brightest things – the world has never felt smaller to me than it did this weekend, chatting with people I love in Nepal with one hand while answering emails about them with the other.  Everybody is okay, and I was/am in Connecticut for six weeks.  Everybody’s been sleeping outdoors for fear of aftershocks, one of our students lost his house, and there is some damage in our working areas–but we were mostly spared because the earthquake moved east.  Had it moved west, Pokhara and Kaskikot would be rubble, as we were just 50 miles from the epicenter.
Tons of people have asked how they can help.  After days of looking into this, it’s clear there are a million conflicting answers amid widespread caution; disasters of this nature cause huge sums of money to be suddenly poured in to a poor country with corrupt public systems and an overzealous, wealthy international aid machine. Terrible precedents in Haiti and other places, strong opinions that the punditry is already debating on the news….
We have to start someplace, so here’s the advice I’ve settled on.  There are two types of donating: a large relief agency, and something more closely related to your area of interest or personal connection to a place or organization. These roughly correlate to massive crisis relief vs. community recovery, as well.
1. MASSIVE AID: If you are most comfortable giving to a large, well-recognized agency, there are recommendations in the links below. The up side is these organizations play an essential role in crisis relief, and their financial pluses and minuses are known.  The down side is that they get saturated with more donations than they can spend on the specific crisis in question, and these agencies are not good mechanisms for long-term recovery.  That said, Nepal couldn’t possibly deal with the immediate disaster on its hands without their involvement, and the same will be true of the next disaster, if that’s where your dollar technically lands.  I’d also suggest the Nepal Red Cross Society as these funds will at least stay in Nepal (http://www.nrcs.org – this link doesn’t work in Safari, that’s Nepal for you), or Doctors Without Borders (http://bit.ly/1pf6vN4) in the hope they’ll be quicker to get out to neglected rural areas.
Top recommended by PRI: http://bit.ly/1GjrqTm
2. COMMUNITY-BASED RECOVERY: It is going to take many years to rebuild, and smaller, local organizations with experience in grassroots organizing and sustainable community work will play an essential role because of their nuanced knowledge, experience, and granular infrastructure. The challenge here – and I will be the bad guy who says this now – is that nobody knows exactly what will be required of them yet. I’ve been in contact with many of my friends who have long standing connections and expertise in Nepal, and we’re all grappling with the same problem, trying to figure out where we can best apply our efforts.  But the truth is that everything is unknown.  It has only been three days and people are currently sleeping in the rain with dwindling food supplies.
Here is a short, poignant article that talks about how hard-to-reach areas have already been widely neglected by both aid and the media – because, well, they are harder to reach – but how badly they will be needed to avoid another Haiti fiasco. I wish this could be on the cover of every major newspaper.
Therefore after much deliberation, I’ve decided the best thing I can do is create a relief fund that will be used intelligently as things clarify. I will be arriving in Nepal in 2 weeks, and working with others to find something unreachable by “big aid” that needs doing and figure out who is the best person or agency to do it. I may donate this whole fund to a nimble community organization or individual doing critical work, or we may set up something ourselves. There may be a water source that needs repairing for a whole village, or a single family or child whose life has been forever altered where we can intervene with a surgery or other aid – I just don’t know yet.  But Pokhara is fifty miles from Gorkha, which looks like this:
Courtesy of the New York Times

Courtesy of the New York Times

As my friend Prashant said, “Laura, I can’t see with my fingers or eat with my knees.  We each have to do the thing we’re suited for.”  So in that vein, please don’t take this as pressure to contribute to Eva Nepal’s recovery fund specifically – the point is to choose something and pitch in.  Since I find myself among a tiny minority of Americans with a long-standing personal connection to this country and its people, that’s what I’m going to start with.  I simply know my area and its ecosystem better than I know other things about this colossal situation.
Here is the link. Please write RELIEF in the indicated space:
https://evanepal.secure.nonprofitsoapbox.com/earthquake-donateObviously, I would be extremely grateful if you would share this with people asking you where to donate.
If something else calls you, go for it.  The only real DONT’s are:
  • send stuff (google “send money not stuff”)
  • go running to Nepal (unless you have an expertise to offer – but I don’t think most of you were considering it?)
  • do nothing. The scale of devastation in Nepal is staggering. When I think about being in New Orleans eight months after Hurricane Katrina and the inside-out buildings that were still piled up on the streets, I can’t even fathom how Nepal with its underlying poverty and challenging terrain is going to rebuild without a lot of help.  Please pick something and pitch in.
I will leave you with a thought from the article I linked above, that helped me put the storm of the last few days in to perspective as they relate to me, one person with a tiny mud and stone home in Nepal that I love dearly.
Far away from Mt. Everest’s glamorous peak…villagers are reeling from injuries, death and the destruction of already precarious livelihoods on a massive scale. One villager told us that although his family and many others were unharmed, his home of mud and stone, like the entire village, was a pile of rubble. For many of the rural poor, a two-story home is a most prized asset. While their plight may not make the international headlines, rural Nepalis across the country will need long-term support to rebuild their lives. 
With much love and gratitude for all of your inquiries and prayers,
Laura and all of us.

Base Camp

Between Worlds

How Many

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The List finally arrived in my inbox on Jan 29. Two lists, actually: one from two years ago, and one from last year. The title of the List, which Laxu picked up from the Foreign Employment Office, is Assistance Decision Made From (Date) to (Date). It’s a record of insurance payments managed by the government that’s as close as I’ve been able to get to a list of migrant laborers who’ve died abroad.

The first question I needed to answer was How Many. It seems as if everyone knows there is a flow of bodies arriving home to Nepal from overseas, but nobody is quite sure what the scale of the tide is. I’ve noticed that people I’ve interviewed usually shrug off the question How Many a few times, and then give me a sudden, precise answer that measures their own anxiety over the problem.

From April 2012 to April 2013, there are 727 names on the List. The following year, ending in April 2014, lists 24 women and 856 men—and average of nearly three laborers per day.

In reality, How Many is a more complicated number than three per day. A certain number of laborers go abroad off the books, or over the border seasonally to India. Study abroad has also become hugely popular, and waves of luckier young people to exodus to foreign countries (although I would guess that most of the boys in Kaskikot, given the choice, would still opt for labor over study).  While about 300,000 laborers per year leave Nepal through manpower companies, the total migration rate is a lot higher – closer to 800,000 annually.

All of which is to say, the airlines officer and security guard may not have been all that far off when they estimated the number of bodies or insurance claims they receive daily. Some estimates put the body count around five per day.  But I’m mainly concerned with young men, and occasionally women, who sign up with labor companies.

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When I opened the List for the first time, I felt like an intruder. To see a list of names in a place of reverence is one thing. But the black and white letters under Assistance Decision Made from (Date) to (Date) are simply data: eight hundred and eighty statistics.

Besides, each name was listed with only a spouse name, village and ward number (there are no house addresses in rural Nepal), and a date of death. It’s 42 pages long.  I had no idea how I would locate or speak with any of these families.

I closed the List and it was a few weeks before I opened it again. Then, yesterday, I was in Kaskikot, filling up our tin jugs at the water tap, when Madu walked by.

“Hey Madu,” I said. “Remember the project I told you about?” I said I was looking for the family of a young man who’d died abroad. After all that work, I was back where I’d started, having talked to Madu three months ago when I first arrived.  Honestly, I hoped Madu could help me circumvent the List.

As we were talking, Sher dai, another neighbor, walked by and joined our conversation.  He offered to do some inquiry on my behalf in Kaskikot, but then I mentioned that I had a List already at my house.  He followed me back home, where I set down the basket and took out the water jug. I pulled up a low stool in the yard and took at my laptop.

We reopened the list.  I searched “Kaski.” Sher dai and I started copying and pasting a short list of names in to fresh document.  Many were from Pokhara or surrounding Kaski villages that I know well: Leknath, Syangia, Hemja.  And then we came upon Dirgharaj Adhikari, Kaskikot-08.

“Sher dai, this boy is from Kaskikot.  Where is ward number 8?”

Sher dai said said he would look into our short list and get back to me. To my surprise, he came back not two hours later.

Dirgharaj Adhikari’s house is just half an hour up the road. It’s likely that, at some point in the past, I ran in to him in a bus or shop or at Kalika School, where he studied. He died last spring in Qatar. He was 22 years old.

“Shall we go?” Sher dai asked.

It was only 11 am.  Just a few hours earlier it had been a month since I’d faced the matter at all.  I’d assumed before I even began this project that I wouldn’t have to look far to find the bereaved family of a young male laborer.  But it was still unnerving to be so flatly correct.

I pulled my microphone and camera out of the back of the dresser and put them in my bag.  I got on the back of Sher dai’s motorcycle and we left for Dirgharaj’s house.  Within minutes, we turned off the main dirt road on to a small motor path that lead to a lone house, perched high up on the hillside. As we approached, I could see the yard was full of people.  A leather-thin man with clear green eyes emerged from the yard to greet us a respectful distance from the entry way. He was Dirgharaj’s father.

We had arrived exactly on the day of sarad, the annual puja that marks the anniversary of a death.  The entire family was there to honor Dirgharaj.  He died exactly one year ago today.

“Hello sir…may we come in?” I asked. “We’d like to hear about your son.”

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Learn more about Dirgaraj and his wife Bishnu on PRI’s The World, where this radio story aired in December, 2015.

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Aamaa, Aidan and Pascal, Didi and Bishnu, Family, Kaskikot, Nepal Life, Reflections

Stone Paths

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Yesterday, I went with Aamaa and Neru and Didi to carry 40 kg of cauliflower up the mountain from Pokhara, because, as we know, that’s the kind of thing I do to relax.  Why, you ask? Fair question. At Milan Chowk people are selling cauliflower and potatoes at seasonal wholesale rates, and because our relatives are there, we got an even sweeter deal.  Tell me you’ve ever purchased cauliflower for less than 6 cents per kilogram, baby.

What are we going to do with 40 kilograms of cauliflower? Ah, I thought you’d want to know. First, we’re going to schlep it up to Kaskikot. Then we can chop it in to thin pieces and dry it in the sun to eat later in the fall. And that brings us to yet another day of long steep stone paths, ropes, and heavy loads.

We took the forested footpath on north side, a walk I regularly make in about 35 minutes going down and one hour going up. It leaps (or drops, depending on which direction you’re going in) directly from the flat valley to the spiny ridge top.

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As we neared the bottom of the trail, Didi was walking a short way ahead when Aamaa pointed to a lone man in an empty rice paddy on the valley floor.

“That’s the field where Didi was born,” she said.

I’ve always known that Didi was born during rice planting season, when Aamaa went to work and returned home instead with her first baby.  But I didn’t realize the field was so far away from the house. It belongs to a relative, and I’ve never been to it.

“That one?” I squinted and pointed like I was on safari in Zimbabwe.

“Yes.  And then we walked up this path that afternoon.”

“…What?”

“I came here the night before to plant rice, but I had Didi at 8am the next morning.  And at 4pm we walked back up this same way with the baby.”

“…THIS one?! How is that possible?”

“I know.  Can you believe it? I couldn’t do it now.”

I might as well insert here that my brother and sister-in-law welcomed my niece Eliza Jane Spero in to the world just a few days ago, on March 6, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Running around here in Nepal, my mind has been largely preoccupied with thoughts of soft blankets and white linens and wrinkled baby feet at home. So maybe it was just the way the moment came together. But I looked at Didi chasing Aidan and Pascal down the stones in front of us, and all of a sudden it seemed impossible all over again that all of us were there together.

IMG_7151Aamaa was 20 years old when she had Didi, and she endured many hardships after she hiked up this long, unforgiving path later that same afternoon.  I can only imagine how birthing a child must have been then, when medical facilities, telephones, basic shops, and decent roads—to the extent any of these existed at all—were at least a day’s walk away.

Now, 35 later, here we were walking on the same stones. Standing on them, it’s hard to comprehend that millions of people in the world still live in that kind of poverty today, when it seems like an unbearable situation for one single individual. Every once and a while, all those millions are suddenly the one person in front of me, and today, it was Didi. She seemed like a miracle. And the path – which I’ve skipped down and climbed up hundreds of times – just stays there while people go up and down it, carrying their stories from one decade to the next.

It was 6pm by the time Aamaa and I got home with our 20kg loads of cauliflower. We have a lot of slicing to do.

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