Floods - Rautahat, Eastern Nepal
the adventure
"We are grateful that you have come to help us prepare ourselves before
the monsoon season arrives...."
​
Following the many preceding missions to impart disaster planning and response skills to our Nepalese brothers and sisters, there was now an opportunity for the Taja Asa team to train and transfer these skills to help another local community. I was glad, because this mission would present another step of local empowerment in the right direction.
​
This village community in Rautahat, was situated in the terai, or low-lying, region of eastern Nepal. While mountain village communities are often vulnerable to horrific landslides during the monsoon season, those villages in the terai regions are prone to large-scale flooding threats. It is not unusual for whole communities in these low-lying lands to lose much of what they own during the annual monsoon floods. Padi fields, livestock, homes and even family members often perish in these local crises that go unreported. Over time, many communities develop a stoic acceptance of their annual "fate" and try to re-start after each deadly monsoon. This cycle of loss-and-re-start also ensures that they remain chronically poor.
​
Having undergone our disaster skills training course the previous year, our Brother Prem* (not his real name) from Rautahat was moved to help his community prepare before the next monsoon flood struck. So, following a series of discussions, we managed to configure a mixed Singaporean-Nepalese training team for this Taja Asa mission and headed for Rautahat. A key difference in this mission, however, was that I wanted our Nepalese team mates to step up, and take on most of the planning and conduct of the skills training. The Singaporean members would reinforce their efforts. There was some reluctance initially, but they eventually agreed to take up the challenge.
​
Over the next couple of days, the hundred or so villagers gathered under a makeshift shelter to learn disaster preparedness skills together as a community. The days were extremely hot and humid; at times, it became simply too oppresively hot to continue. But, everyone persisted. We learned not only about the need to prepare, but also essential skills like how to survey terrain, how to construct, site and monitor simple early warning devices, how to organise the community for evacuation, the identification and construction of emergency evacuation shelters, planning and marking of evacuation routes, and so on. My heart also swelled with pride, as I saw my Nepalese team members step up to instruct and facilitate the various lessons.
For many of the villagers, the concept of disaster preparedness was novel. But, when preparedness was presented as no different from preparing their lands for a new planting season, then the concept began to appear acceptable. And, they bagan to realise that their annual loss and reset was not their inevitable fate; they could change this fate if they were willing to try thinking and doing a little differently.
​
​
* Postscript:
Under Prem's able and motivated leadership, the elders and villagers took many positive steps to prepare the people, livestock and land ahead of the monsoon season. Consequently, they were spared the most severe effects when the monsoon floods came a few months later.
