Day 6: Chauthe
Here’s the update from Day 6.
Members of DW visited Nuwakot Earthquake Impact Assessment. There were six of them and traveled on Motorbikes due to terrain. The place they visited were called Chauthe and Okharpauwa VDCs. The team spent considerable time meeting with local people in Thuldanda, Bhandarthumka, Dhungana gaon, Siudeni. Some of the answers they came up with was
Very tough under open sky. Construction of temporary shed has become their first priority. They are also looking for food stuffs as the quantity they have will last only for two to three weeks.
Not received any relief pacakage whatsoever
Urgently needed building materials and money to pay for labor
Are the all houses damaged
Not much concerned about medicines. [ The team felt that there could be sanitation issues. Nonetheless, villagers seemed least bothered about such thing. They wanted roof over their heads more than anything.
As a token of gesture,
RS 10, 000 was given to one house hold which has lost a grand mother (55 yrs) and grand daughter (3 years).
RS 10, 000 to one house that lost its son (22 years)
RS 2000 to one house that had a mentally challanged person.
RS 500 to old man
One of the Members of Team RAM, Paul was taken to one of the health camps held at Changu Narayan. He was also ‘lucky’ enough to attend the grand meeting organised by WHO, World Health Organisation, around evening. Paul is currently ‘camped’ in a tent inside DW Complex. One of the glitches that surfaced was that he has been asked by Ministry of Health to come up with hard copy of all documents since all the data entered pertaining to their access to work as a member of relief team has gone missing. He will be escorted to MoH tomorrow. We will then have two more members of RAM team joining him tomorrow. Time permitting, we will also take him to one of the City Hospitals, KMC if everything happens swiftly at ministry.
Even though DW hasn’t been providing vehicle facility, we did help one of our employees help transport relief material to Bagbazar. Likewise, we will help transport relief material to Nagarik Hospital in the morning tomorrow. In turn, they will be donating a huge cache of clothes which will be handed over to ‘Clothes for Victims’ – a campaign led by Sudan Shrestha of Deerwalk.
Today being Saturday, we spent time making plans for what next for upcoming week. As a part of that process, I contacted 1234, government helpline but that was of not much use. I somehow managed to get hold of CDO Office and they recommended us that we go clean place called Gongabu and area nearby Balaju. We plan to leave for that place around noon. We will be buying some shovels, helmets, lime powder and gloves. We will also assess other places trying to focus on cleaning up operation. We will soon get started with portal that has pictures of houses to whom we have donated. As repair work begins, we plan to update the site. Next, we contacted several agencies and we were told that people are desperately looking for TENTS. Since the number of casualties is drastically going up, government is waking up to provide security. Should situation improve we will visit Sindhuplachowk. All in all DW received 11 calls just today calling from help, primarily from, Sindhupalchowk and Dhading.
