Most people flee disaster areas, but one Maltese girl decided to head for one last year, when a devastating earthquake hit Nepal, ripping apart a country with which she had fallen in love during a three‐week holiday in 2014. Michaela Zammit la Rosa, a 24-year-old mechanical engineer, tells Jacob Borg her story.
"The Nepal I knew and came to love on visiting it in November 2014 came to a grinding halt for 56 seconds on 25 April last year when an earthquake measuring a staggering 7.8 on the Richter scale shook the country in what was to become the largest natural disaster in Nepal to date. If the Ghorka earthquake wasn't enough, a second and equally disastrous quake, with a magnitude of 7.3, hit east Kathmandu on 12 May", she said.
"The news hit home immediately. It felt as if someone had violated something of mine. It was then that I decided I would return to Nepal to help in post earthquake relief work. Some 600,000 homes were destroyed, over 10,000 people were killed and over 700 of all the heritage sites in and around Kathmandu were damaged. The world initially rushed to help, with millions of dollars flooding into the country and thousands of able hands willing to work.
"Eight months on, there is still a lot of help, but so much left to be done. Nepal is suffering and most of the world has forgotten."
Michaela says she easily put her fears of heading into the unknown behind her. "I was much more compelled to go and help – knowing what large-scale devastation there had been –than I was scared. I'm not one to waste much energy on being scared of things that are out of my control. All I knew is that I wanted to go and be a pair of able hands with time – which was the most that I could possibly offer."
Far from fearing for her own safety, Michaela's initial fear was much closer to home, as it took her a while to tell her parents of her intentions. "It took me months to pluck up the courage to ask them, because I thought they would try and stop me but instead, the news was received with support. They were, of course, worried and they would have preferred me not to go, but they were so, so much more supportive than I expected. My dad had donated money towards the cause and they were proud that I was going."
Michaela headed for Nepal last August and spent five weeks working with an NGO called Volunteer initiative Nepal (VIN) that was dedicated to offering post-earthquake relief work. "I was assigned to work in a small town called Jitpurphedi, just outside Kathmandu, on a mission to declare the town an Open Defecation-Free-Zone. Basically, I was building toilets. These weren't the 21st century toilets that we are used to but they were basically holes dug into the rock that were two metres in diameter by two metres deep.
"These holes acted as a 'tank' and then we built a small room with a hole in the ground and a pipe leading to the hole that had a cover of sorts. So basically it was just simple manual labour towards a better state of sanitation."
Michaela describes the deathly quiet scene that greeted her when she arrived in the Nepalese capital. "On arrival in Kathmandu in the evening, the most noticeable change was the complete lack of tourists: the airport and streets of Kathmandu used to be buzzing with tourists haggling their way through the merchants in the narrow streets of Thamel and queuing up to get a bite to eat in a good eatery. Now it was 9pm and Thamel was quiet, mostly shut even.
"This was not enough to convince me that the Kathmandu I knew had changed, possibly permanently. So bright and early the next morning, I was determined to walk through the narrow streets of the area called Thamel leading to the once-bustling Durbar Square. Horror and tears were, to my surprise, my involuntary reaction on entering Durbar Square. I simply could not believe my eyes. Suffice it to say that what was once revered and respected as the centre of Kathmandu was now nothing more than a danger to everyone who visited.
"An initial glance into Durbar Square revealed a collection of stark red 'Danger' signs and information boards with pictures of what had once proudly stood there. Piles of rubble and pieces of temples were clinging on through the constant tremors, propped up by modest wooden poles while efforts to clear up the clutter trickled on.
"In most places, the damage was acute and localised, with swathes of land razed to the ground, while on neighbouring sites – seemingly untouched – the extremely lucky ones soldiered on, trudging through rubble where their home or business had once thrived, thankful to be alive.
"At first assessment, the situation in the Thamel neighbourhood seemed less dire than in most. Only some streets seemed to have received the brunt of the disaster. With local insight and further observation, it became more clear that the densely populated narrow alleys of Thamel had survived relatively well due to this extreme density.
"Everything seemed to have shifted, causing surface damage but allowing survival. It was a marvel to see that, at the heart of all this, was a people who were grateful to be alive and hopeful for the future. The ground was studded with personal belongings of all kinds as if to form the asphalt on which they drove. Houses had been destroyed and abandoned, schools reminders of the children that once flowed through them, fear in everyone's eyes but smiles constantly fighting to break through."
Michaela was working 40‐hour weeks in difficult conditions doing very physical work. "Here 40-hour weeks were just the beginning. Family time and relaxation were replaced by road repairs, home reconstruction and sanitation improvements – practically another full-time job rebuilding everything that had been taken away. Land transport was a joke at best before the earthquake. Now it was a series of rickety people-carriers making an effort to transport passengers while clinging on to the sides of valleys and mountains. The roads were riddled with debris, and there was a constant threat of landslides.
"Rivers that were once pristine and clear are now dammed in most places and running brown where they aren't. The plush emerald vistas are laden with a somewhat ironic white film of dust and dirt that seemed to echo the country's overall condition. Views of corrugated-iron temporary housing dot these vibrant green valleys, as the sun is reflected off them, while the skeletons of former villages clutter the surrounding areas – serving as a constant reminder of the disaster.
"Today, the country is in a vicious circle of striving to restore Nepal to its former glory, which would increase tourist numbers to what they were, but the restoration requires enormous funding that is usually generated by the tourist economy.
"This is the large-scale plight that the Nepalese are facing on a daily basis, while dealing with the immediate problems related to health, sanitation and survival – all the things we take for granted everyday!
"I am convinced that more people would be moved to take a stand and contribute to this mission if they were only reminded of the dire situation in Nepal today."
from The Malta Independent http://ift.tt/1PIwV2v
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