Driven to despair

In Picture: Just a month after losing her husband, Rani Jom Tamang, of Lapa VDC, Dhading, lost her home in the earthquake of April 2015.

Dhadingbesi, June 17, 2016: Forty-seven-year-old Rani Jom Tamang was walking in front of her makeshift shelter like a lost soul. She is still struggling to come to terms with the double tragedies she suffered last year.

A month before the devastating earthquake on April 25 last year, her husband died after falling from a tree while collecting fodder in Lapa VDC-2. Then the quake destroyed her house, killing all the cattle she had.

With five mouths to feed–three children of her elder daughter and two of the younger one–and no source of income, Rani is at her wit’s end. Her two married off daughters are out of contact for a while.

“I cannot go to work as these kids are too small to be left alone here,” she says. “A sack of rice is what I have now.”

After the earthquake turned the entire village into rubble, Rani, along with other villagers, moved to Dhansar Pakha near Dhadingbesi, the district headquarters of Dhading, which is two days’ walk from her village.

A makeshift shelter made up of zinc sheets and tarpaulin is what she calls home, which barely protected her from chilling wind during winter and pounding rains during monsoon. “Another monsoon has come; I don’t know how I am going to endure this,” says Rani.

Most of the earthquake survivors living in this settlement go to the district headquarters to work as labourers. “But I cannot,” says Rani.

Her 18-year-old son Dil Tamang failed the SLC exam last year. “He too does not come to meet me these days. He could not pass the exam because of the shock of his father’s death and the earthquake added to his trauma.”

The local administration has repeatedly asked the earthquake survivors to vacate the place.

More than 100 families (around 400 people) have been living in Dhansar Pakha since the earthquake. Of them, 70 percent people are from Lapa and remaining from Jharling and Tepling VDCs.

“We cannot return to our village. I don’t have a home there. Land in that area has numerous cracks and monsoon rains could trigger landslides,” she says, urging the government to do the needful for earthquake survivors like her who have nowhere to go.

By Anup Ojha