So Much, So Little

KAVRE, NEPAL: POST QUAKE UPDATE

The monsoon is here and many households in the villages are still living in make shift tents. As the days pass, we are beginning to see how widespread the needs and problems of earthquake survivors in many of the affected villages are. For example, 2 government schools (mostly attended by children from poor families) recently informed us that only about 50% of students are back in class. This is bad news not only for students who are missing out, but for teachers too. This is because part of teachers’ wages actually come from the community and monthly school fees collected from their students. Therefore with fewer students coming to school, many teachers’ livelihood are badly affected.

Less than 50% of students are back in school today

Nearly 90% of houses in the villages are damaged beyond repair and families suffered considerable loss of property. Their collapsed houses have buried their food grain and much of their belongings such as clothing & crockery, their children’s school bags & uniform, textbooks & stationery. As a result, many families could no longer afford to send their children to school. Even those who are able to attend school are often hungry because their parents are not able to pack enough food for them in their daily lunchboxes. The teachers not only feel sorry for their students, they are also concerned because hunger affects a child’s ability to concentrate and learn. Seeing this and on the urging of our village community representative, we decided to embark on a modest feeding program for about 150 students in these 2 schools for the next 6 months.

A fallen tree that collapsed on a village school during the quake

Building temporary rain shelters even in the rain.

Safe from the rain now.

Many are still waiting

In August last year, the country battled their worst monsoon flooding in 50 years. Incidentally, that was also when we first forayed into rebuilding houses for calamity survivors in Nepal. Our 80-house rebuilding project in Bardiya was completed in May 2015. (Read about it here) This year, monsoon floods once again hit the region and one community leader from another village called and cried that they had lost all their food grain. We sent 50,500 NRS (670 SGD) to buy 1,050 kg of rice to help 70 families. Almost every week we are dispensing funds to provide relief for needy families suffering from one calamity after another. We are only now beginning to realise how much each family had actually lost, which is nearly everything they have in this world. This in turn affects the entire community and country at large.

BBC News has an interesting article titled “What I Saved from the Rubble.” Click on the link to discover what precious items 9 survivors managed to salvage.

If money is not an issue, we would help everyone. And we will help as many families as we can with the funds that we have, even after media attention for quake survivors wanes.