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Local children pitch in as aid and medical care remain scarce in devastated Nepal
For a small group of children attending the Little Angels School on the outskirts of Kathmandu, life will never be the same again.
Their families live primarily in the Langtang region, which was one of the areas worst affected by last week’s earthquake. Some lost only one parent, but the families of others have been wiped out. A few don’t yet know if they have been orphaned because communication with regions in the areas near the Tibetan border is virtually impossible.
At the moment, the school is their haven because it remained largely untouched – only a few walls have fallen and the buildings show a few cracks. All schools in Nepal have been closed so citizens can come to terms with what has happened and count their losses.
School principal Shristi Limbu says the Nepalese people depend on themselves and each other, not the corrupt and unhelpful government. The school has made its buses available free of charge to families who need to go and help relatives elsewhere in the country.
Aid is available in the city, but not elsewhere. With tons of emergency foreign aid relief being sent to Nepal, aid teams are unable to give it to those in need. Roads have been cut off, and with them, medical care.
Over the past week, residents started using spades and wheelbarrows to bring some order to the chaos caused by the quake, which measured 7.7 on the Richter scale. Some buildings surrounding the school are still precariously balanced.
“Even our older pupils and their friends are helping as volunteers and guides to orient emergency aid teams,” said Limbu. “Others are loading supplies on scooters and delivering them to where people have the most critical need. All the universities and colleges are closed so that they can help.
“Here at Little Angels, we keep the children busy so that they don’t think too much about the events of the past week. The older children help the younger ones and assist in the kitchen with little tasks.”
South African aid group Gift of the Givers, with which City Press’ sister newspaper, Rapport, travelled, began operating on patients injured in the quake on Friday. The first two patients were boys aged 10 and 17 who had suffered a badly fractured elbow and thigh, respectively, during the earthquake.
The surgeons have 12 more patients lined up to operate on today, all with serious fractures.
Aid group head Imtiaz Sooliman said the surgeons will start with the children who needed surgery and would then move to more than 20 patients already waiting for operations.
Other members of the medical team – which includes trauma doctors, theatre nurses, emergency specialists, paediatric surgeons and even dentists – will be dispatched to three other hospitals.
The charity’s search and rescue teams left for some of the remote areas yesterday, where little or no help had yet arrived. The roads are so inaccessible that the teams had to hike to their destinations.
One of Kathmandu’s biggest Hindu temples, Shupati, is still standing. It is here where the dead are brought to be cremated, and smoke has been wafting uninterrupted into the sky since last Sunday
