Disaster Relief and Needs Assessment - East and Far West Nepal (I)
the adventure
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"We have lost so much...but we want to be hopeful...."
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The floods came rushing in the night, Mina recounted. The wife of a local village chief, she told us that her whole village was ill-prepared. The waters swept through her village quickly and strongly. Families ran. Children became separated from their parents. Animals drowned. Valuables were lost. Mud houses melted away. The strong currents carried along snakes and debris. Large tracts of farmland became choked with sand. There would be no harvests this year.
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Mina’s story was repeated in numerous other villages in the plains. For mountain villagers, the familiar story was one of frightening landslides that created the similar type of losses, fear and trauma as the floods. This wasn’t my first disaster experience. But, seeing first-hand what the villagers had experienced and lost broke my heart. And I wondered: how were we to help, when the floods and landslides had taken away so much from so many of the already-poor?
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Yet, my team and I also witnessed acts of kindness and determination that gave us cause for hope. There were poor neighbours who selflessly shared what little they had with others. Some communities started gathering themselves together to clean up their villages. These were encouraging signs of self-help and determination to recover.
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From communities in the East to those in the Far West of Nepal, this year’s monsoon rains have devastated so many. Following the initial stage of flooding and landslides, mosquitoes were now starting to breed en mass in the sticky hot environment. Very soon, they would deliver the next stage of problems like malaria to the people. So, as part of immediate relief, our team equipped enough mosquito nets to protect some 12,000 people from these deadly mosquitoes.
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Beyond the immediate relief efforts, however, we assessed that it might actually be more helpful to encourage community self-help capacity and reduce their vulnerability. To this end, our follow-on relief strategy would involve equipping them with practical community mobilisation and disaster preparedness techniques, as well as housing kits to rebuild homes and farming tools to clear destroyed farmlands. With determined effort and application, these skills would help them help themselves over the longer term.
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