It was a great feeling to leave Kathmandu behind for three days last week. Dusty roads, traffic, noise - all gone once you cross the river two hours drive from the city, and enter the sensual world of remote villages.
People really do live everywhere in this country. You see lights and shiny zinc roofs spread all across the hills, sometimes long walk from each other. I get hopelessly nostalgic and romantic when I see these places - because of their extreme purity and beauty. And because of luxurious amounts of time people devote to meeting, discussing, playing around, walking to the river, telling each other stories. Or maybe because of the lack of light in the night, which allows you to see the stars you never even dreamt of, and walk without a flashlight and “see” how the locals just do it, without falling and stumbling all the time? And because of the early, early mornings, when I was woken up by a swarm of people who decided to have a meeting at the school at 6 in the morning. Once you open the door to your tent, there is an old Nepali sitting on the stone that keeps the tent from flying away. Right at the very door. I guess he couldn’t believe people’d be still asleep at this time of the day.
Matjaz and Eva, our friends from Slovenia who organised for weeks jeeps that provided people with most needed supplies, decided that in Rasuwa they would open a camp. This way people would stay constantly in the village and provide with more systematic help, given the size of the village and amount of needs. The idea was successful due to series of coincidences - in the Yellow House and via personal contacts they met a team of professional doctor-nurse from USA and their friend, firefighter and policeman from Slovenia. Well prepared and trained people could start an improvised hospital in the village, where they treated dozens of cases a day. There were unbelievable stories - such as finding a pwoman in a barn who was crushed by a wooden beam and spent two weeks waiting for help, as she lost her baby and broke her pelvis as a result of the incident. She was denied help from Doctors without Borders, who would not travel without a helicopter to take her out of there. The team took her on a jeep that drove each day with supplies and back to Kathmandu - and she’s been through a surgery, now getting better.
I am waiting for Matjaz to finish his thesis and come and write for us here, to read how was it for him to organise help on spot as a foreigner but a person with a fairly good understanding of Nepali culture and the context.
The village was provided with food, tin sheets, medical help and medicine, buckets full of nutrients, vitamins and medicine that would serve new mothers and women in pregnancy, clothes and temporary housing solutions. There were dozens of tarps that were distributed across the village, and later on from the money we collected people were provided with 10 metal shelters. As for now, the shelters will serve families and orphans in the worst situation, and after the reconstruction of the village they can become more of a communal space in case of emergency.
What’s important is that a group of trained engineers who came to help building the first shelters did everything in cooperation with the locals - this way they learnt and soon took over the construction, improving the shelters with local materials.
This way once we came to Rasuwa, we didn’t have much to do in terms of actual help. We had to improvise - we prepared drawing workshops for kids from the village and once they overcame the fear of taking anything from us, it went great. We even had an exhibition on the walls of the school of their works. I brought some movies with me and organised a small screening each evening, before they had to go home. They loved it. And then we more or less spent time wandering around the village and talking to kids. This for me ended up especially fortunately, as I decided to follow two twelve-year-old boys down the hill to the waterfall. It was a tricky walk, 2000-something meters down, then across a dangerous mountain river, and climbing up again to the waterfall. But the fun we had on the way, catching animals, eating fruits we found, throwing stones in the water and being goofy under the waterfall was priceless. At least for these three days of our presence some of the kids on obligatory holidays had some new excitement - a bunch of strangers who spoke English to them and wanted to learn some Nepali in exchange, and who would follow them to see the little miracles of the place where they live.
I could go on talking about the beauty of the village, the simplicity of the food, the places we have seen, but this post is already too long. And there is one more important thing.
The relief work in Nepal is basically over and now the effort will be channeled towards reconstruction. Doing my low-scale fundraising I managed to collect 650 dollars - which was enough to buy four shelters for the village (400 dollars), support Robotics Association of Nepal to finish building another batch of solar panels (200 dollars) and 50 dollars is left for the books that will go to the Bottle House. If you want to help, great. I will be here for two more months and I can make sure your help goes straight to the right hands. How to do it? Send the money to my bank account
PL62 1140 2004 0000 3012 0275 6179 Natalia Skoczylas
SWIFT BREXPLPW or BREXPLPWMBK
If you have a certain idea already, drop me a line natalia@edgeryders.eu where you want the money to be spent, and so it will be. Every amount helps here.
Note: Most of the photos was taken by my young friends and guides from Bhorle, who just took over any camera there was in the radius and jumped on documenting.