For poor villagers, no time to mourn

JIWANPUR (Dhading, Nepal): Shekhar Dunghana, 32, is not at his home or what is left of it in the hilltop village of Jiwanpur in Dhading, Nepal. His father and nephew died when his house collapsed on April 25. But on the third day, he pushed out of the village to search for work.
A couple of kilometres away, Dorba Bhetuwal, 35, is perched on a bamboo structure hammering nails into tin sheets to erect what will be his new home.Of the 2,100 homes in Jiwanpur, none is standing or liveable. It has seen close to 60 of 650 deaths that Dhading witnessed. But no one in Jiwanpur seems to have time to mourn the dead or wait for relief. Their desperate poverty has ensured that life continues to move, without a pause.
There is still severe scarcity of food and tarpaulin shelters and an overstretched government has been unable to reach all. Help from NGOs is too small to match the scale of the disaster. Till Sunday, only about 260 tents brought by NGOs had reached Jiwanpur, a village of 10,000 people spread over an entire hill. But the poor villagers are used to fending for themselves.
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“Our crop is also destroyed. There is nothing left with us. My husband has gone to town to look for work and get some money,” says Dunghana’s wife Kalpana even as she comes out of a tin shed that she erected from the rubble of her house — much before the government even announced distribution of tents. Pulling out wooden planks from his fallen house to resurrect a new one, Bidur Keshi, 55, said, “I have 13 members in my family. All need shelter. It’s very cold at night. We can’t keep waiting for help. Life must go on.”
And it has, with villagers helping each other tide over their troubles. When no relief came to the village for four days after the quake and people began to run out of food, Krishna Prasad Gartola, the 76-year-old local grocer, opened the doors of his store. People picked up grains and supplies on credit.
“I have no hope of getting that money back. But you can’t refuse people in trouble. They are all my neighbours. Now, I myself have little to eat,” he said. Narayan Subhedi runs a community radio from a small office on the road below Jiwanpur hill. “I don’t know how many people can access it at the moment. But I have been trying to give tips on survival and information about when any help is arriving. Where to go and collect what,” he said.
But Jiwanpur may need more than that. Balbahadur Thapa Magar, 24, and his sister are both blind. The only skill they have is rearing goats and cows. But their entire livestock is dead. Their father Deepbahadur, 61, is worried. “I can feed them till I am alive. I don’t know what will happen later,” he said.
A relief worker put the matter in perspective. “Just food and shelter won’t do. Government should give one goat and chicken at least to villagers to help them kickstart their lives,” he said.