Empowerment Story
English 11
September 6th 2016
Helping Hand
On April 25th, a beautiful sunny Saturday morning at 11:56 Nepal faced one of its worst disasters. A 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Barpak, Gorkha. Countless villages were destroyed and many people were made homeless. A few weeks later , our family took the arduous four hour journey to reach the earthquake victims. We arrived to many different locations that were affected by the earthquake. The first location we visited was the Nuwakot district, which was the 3rd most affected area by the earthquake. We travelled in a caravan of 3-4 buses that was full of my family and friends up to Nuwakot district, filled with supplies like soap, rice, dal, cooking oil, sugar and tents. We went to theses different locations for about a week.
It took us about 3-5 hours to get there and we had contacted the village chief and the villagers made a line and we distributed all these supplies to almost every person in the village. Surrounding villagers also came by to get the supplies. We had our own cooking supplies and ate lunch there. It was very hectic and time consuming: usually we finished distributing supplies it was around nightfall . People were fighting to get in line because they all wanted supplies as it was very scarce. When we reached Kathmandu it was near midnight . We did this for 3 locations and in Sindupal chowk we took the most supplies there because it was the most affected out of all the areas that were affected by the earthquake. Since Sindupal chowk was most affected, there was a stench of dead bodies and to go there you would wear require masks because the stench was not bearable.
Some of the challenges we faced were that sometimes the buses got spoiled because either there was a mechanical failure or there was a puncture. That was a gigantic problem because we were very far from automobile supplies. We also did not have many tents because tents were very hard to find, we had limited tents and we had to travel to 3 different areas, with each area needing around a hundred tents. Petrol for us itself was a shortage so we did not give petrol to the villages. The roads leading up to the villages were sometimes blocked so we did had to walk and it was tiring in the heat. The most interesting problem was that sometimes people used to jump on our buses on our way to the districts to steal the supplies, so we used to hide our supplies under sheets of cloth so that people on the road would not be tempted jump on the buses. I later asked why the local villagers why the people were jumping on our buses and they said to me that nobody distributed supplies to them so they had to steal. We also saw many UN and international organisations venture further than us and with more supplies. Overall the experience was very inspiring, tiring and a rewarding experience for me.