HVC Kathmandu, Nepal: Becca Budgett

The HVC team that served in Kathmandu has a blog! Follow the rest of their stories at https://fromlondontokathmandu.wordpress.com/

Here's a post by one of our GSI, Becca Budgett about Day 6 of the programme.

Today, after spending the morning at the a hope school, about half of us squeezed into a van alongside 30 blankets and travelled high into the hills surrounding the Kathmandu valley to deliver the blankets to a community that had been badly hit by the earthquakes earlier this year.

8 months after the earthquakes, many families in this community are still living in temporary shacks made of sheets of corrugated metal and pieces of cloth. Although most of the rubble had been cleared away, you could still see evidence of the destruction in the standing houses. Many had cracks in their walls and you could also see where landslides had fallen down the sides of the hills. Although the conditions these families are living in are awful, there was something beautiful about the sense of community amongst the people living there. A communal dining space had been erected from colourful pieces of cloth attached to poles of wood and members of the community sat and ate together whilst music rang out from a boom box.

We distributed about half of the blankets to those living in these tin shacks before venturing up the hillside to where these people had lived previous to the earthquake. These houses were built of crumbly, red terracotta with a tin roof held down by stones. The narrow pathways between the houses were extremely dusty and steep, many covered in rubble. As we climbed higher into the community we distributed blankets to those who needed them.

At the very top of the hill we reached where the home of one women used to stand. You could still see the ruins of her house, next to which HOPE had built a temporary house for her which looked somewhat like an Anderson shelter. HOPE has built around 50 of these temporary shelters in the area. They only cost around £13 to build. This women told us how her 16 year old daughter had been killed in the earthquake and now she lives alone.

I can only imagine the sheer terror this woman, and others living in the community, must have felt when the earthquakes hit. They live in such precarious houses on top of a steep and slippery hill and with no way of running to safety they would have had to stay in their houses whilst they fell down around them. Not only did they have to live through that fear, they then had to deal with the pain of their own family members and friends dying.

I found visiting this community incredibly moving. Especially when one volunteer took off her shoes and another took off her coat to give to this women who was only wearing flip flops and a thin dress despite the freezing temperatures

It’s so easy to sit at home in the UK and watch earthquake footage on TV but not really understand what it is these people are going through. They already live in poverty and then they lose what little possessions they have. They work hard and sacrifice to bring up children who are then killed. And even if their house still stands after the earthquake, many people sleep out on the streets for weeks after the quake because they are scared that their house will collapse.