29 Apr 2015

Nepal earthquake: slow aid stirs anger in ravaged villages

Extensive quake-ravaged areas of Nepal, within easy reach of the capital on reasonable roads, are yet to receive any assistance from either the government or foreign relief agencies.

Distressed and hungry quake-refugees emerging from remote villages close to the Tibetan border report death and destruction on a horrifying scale. Those interviewed by Channel 4 News today said roads running through devastated settlements in the Himalayan foothills are strewn with rotting corpses.

Read more: Nepal earthquake - despair turns to anger

Larger towns, just three-hours’ drive from Kathmandu, remain totally crippled by last Saturday’s earthquake. There is extensive, severe destruction and in many places, the stench of death hangs in the air. Many buildings have completely collapsed.

Injured people have received no medical aid and thousands remain camped out in the open on steep hillsides under makeshift tarpaulins. We found a three-year-old child by the roadside with a badly fractured femur and a long, deep gash down the back of her head. She had received no medical attention at all.

Channel 4 News travelled northeast of Kathmandu, along the Bhote Koshi River, which tumbles through the Himalayan foothills. We were forced, by an impassable rockfall, to stop at the town of Barhabise, close to Nepal’s northern frontier with China.

Along the way, we did not see a single aid truck en route and, four days after the devastating quake, not one of the decimated towns we stopped in reported receiving any outside assistance at all or even encountering a single relief worker. Twice we saw helicopters high above, one of them circling briefly. But local people say none has landed.

What we encountered in Barhabise and other towns ranged from stoicism to desperation. We found an elderly couple in their seventies sitting on a hillside in tears. They have no children and their house was destroyed. “We have lost everything, we have no one to help us, we have no hope and we do not know what to do.”

At the huge rockfall which blocked the road to a Tibetan border town which Nepalis call Tatopani, we found dozens of people who had fled on foot, a trek which had taken eight hours. All reported a large number of fatalities and mass casualties.

Saraswoti Kutwal, a woman in her twenties, said she had decided to risk leading a group of 17 people from her village, Okhaldhunga, because she felt she needed to tell the authorities how bad things were there. “Even if I’m killed by a landslide,” she told us, “at least I would die in my homeland, trying to get help for those trapped in Tatopani.”

“At least I would die in my homeland, trying to get help for those trapped in Tatopani.” Saraswoti Kutwal

Her older brother, Narbahadur Kutwal, who wept as he described scenes of desperation, said Chinese border forces had crossed into Nepal and had provided limited initial assistance. A local youth group, the Mideriyuwa Club, which is based in Tatopani, was the only organisation, he said, offering food and shelter.

He echoed a refrain we heard again and again: “No food, no water, no medicine. Where are they? Where is our government? Where are the international relief workers?”

The three-year-old girl, with the broken leg and severe head wound, was in the town of Lamasaghu, where we had stopped to ask directions from police. The child’s face was badly cut too and she was in pain. From our medical equipment, we cleaned and dressed her wound and put her on a bus to Kathmandu, full of quake refugees.

The child was accompanied by her aunt as her mother was a migrant worker in the Gulf. The mother had been in contact and knew that the family home had been destroyed and her daughter injured. But like most of the thousands of Nepalese migrant workers in the Middle East, was too poor to afford to break her contract and return home.