DATELINE.

 

 

Rebuilding Nepal.

 

REPORTERS:

Aaron Lewis and Meggie Palmer

 

 

Nepal often seems to me like a land that exists outside of time, its ancient structures framing its modern moments and its people, they always seem to be waiting. The capital Kathmandu was built up around monuments that stood imposing over the city for centuries. Until just last year. When the earth quaked and brought them down.  I was here then, when the entire world rallied to Nepal's rescue and pledged to help its people rebuild so that Nepal would never again be caught so tragically unprepared in a disaster.

 

GAGAN THAPA, POLITICIAN:  Even the donors failed us, the Government failed us. Despite that, we are surviving.

 

DORJI SHERPA, MONK (Translation): Because there was so much damage to the natural environment, that’s why I’m a bit concerned in regard to the future.

 

KAMAL BHATTARAI (Translation): Even though Nepal is an earthquake-prone country neither the government, politicians or the public took it seriously.

 

One year later, Nepal seems more vulnerable than ever.

 

SHANTA JIREL, MATERNITY NURSE (Translation):  No. Our people are building houses out of the same bricks and stones that fell down in the earthquake.

 

GAGAN THAPA:  But what if an earthquake of the same magnitude hits tomorrow. Are we better prepared? It's not.

 

REPORTER:  You are not better prepared?

 

GAGAN THAPA:   No.

 

Last year Dateline reporter Meggie Palmer and I spent the days after the quake meeting survivors like Krishna.

 

MEGGIE PALMER:  Krishna, nice to meet you.

 

Today when I meet Krishna on the same street, much of the rubble still remains.

 

KRISHNA DHAREL, QUAKE SURVIVOR:  Many homes fell down here. Around 40 to 50 people died in this place alone.

 

Last year, Krishna's building had six floors. Weeks after the quake the top three floors started to crumble. His family had to evacuate.

 

KRISHNA DHAREL:  People have learned a lot. They have experienced the nightmare and now people have started to sense that it's not earthquakes which kill people, it's the poorly built structures that kill people.

 

It's eerie watching the construction crews digging new foundations beside Krishna's home. I will never forget having to stand around in the days after the quake watching these same backhoes digging to find survivors and eventually exhuming the bodies of the deceased.

 

SHANTA JIREL (Translation):  Some babies were pulled out and rescued after three hours. Five people were killed in the same house. At midnight when they searched they found the five bodies. They took the bodies outside. We couldn’t comprehend what was going on. All I knew is that people were dying all over the place.

Shanta Jirel is the head nurse at a small clinic in the mountains north of Kathmandu. Today a 16-year-old girl has gone into labour and Shanta is speeding with her up the torturous mountain road to the makeshift maternity ward. With no other clinic for miles in any direction, Shanta is a lifeline for these young expectant mothers.

 

After the quake destroyed her clinic, Shanta managed to raise enough for this prefabricated room. Until recently, she was delivering babies in the tent outside. But no matter how hard this all looks to an outsider like me, this clinic is a hopeful place.

 

PREGNANT GIRL (Translation): I’m looking forward to having a baby. Having the baby is the only thing I am looking forward to. The baby is my only hope. We live in fear of aftershocks, we don’t have a house at the moment, we have nothing. We are living in a makeshift house.

 

ANU SHRESTHA, QUAKE SURVIVOR (Translation):  I think having a baby brought us good luck. We got off lightly. None of us were injured. I consider myself lucky in that way.

Emergency care givers like Shanta Jirel have had an overwhelming year, to say the least. Immediately after the quake, global Donors and agencies did help rescue thousands of Nepalis. And pledged almost $4 billion in reconstruction aid. But the rescue effort ended within weeks. And then all the help seemed to just disappear.

 

KAMAL BHATTARAI, JOURNALIST (Translation):  So far only a quarter of what was pledged by international community has resulted in proper agreements, while the initial pledge and announcement got a lot of hype in the media, internationally, very little translated into actual support on the ground. As a result, people left devastated by the earthquake haven’t yet felt the support that was promised. Donors' support and money haven’t reached them.

 

People were left alone to tend to the wounded in their own villages, neighbourhoods. People like Shanta Jirel and monk Dorje Sherpa, a teacher in one of Kathmandu's famous monasteries.

 

DORJI SHERPA (Translation): I try to explain to the kids that we shouldn’t panic when there is an earthquake. People can die of fear and I have that fear as well, but I still say it.

 

When the Government and big foreign Donors appeared to be fading away, the monasteries continued to collect tithes and use that money to deliver whatever aid they could. Like was so often the case last year, most of the help that made it to the survivors came from inside their own communities.

 

DORJI SHERPA (Translation):  Everywhere, there was a shortage of food and water. A monastery is for social help and that is why we were able to set up tents and distribute food and water.

 

While the monks were able to tend to some of the most immediate physical needs in their communities like food, water and tents for shelter, Dorje Sherpa says that stitching the psychic wounds torn open by the quake, burying the fear that it unearthed, he says that has been the hardest part for most of Nepal. 

 

DORJI SHERPA (Translation):  Yes, I’m concerned about the future… and I still fear that there will be another earthquake.

It's a very common fear.

KRISHNA DHAREL:  We were like fearful that there would be another impending disaster, another earthquake which might destroy us, which might kill us.

 

The fear that you hear on the streets is not just of another quake, but that the Government isn't capable of rescue when it happens. Nepal's political parties say they have just taken a historic step towards rebuilding a new and more capable Government. But Nepalis have heard these sorts of promises before.

 

The drive to rebuild Nepal began long before the quake. For almost 50 years the country had been torn apart by autocrats, Monarchists and civil war. It wasn't until after the quake that Nepal's fractured political parties came together to sign Nepal's new Constitution and so Nepal isn't just rebuilding its capital cities and its villages, it's rebuilding its entire state system from the ground up and that meant 2015 was filled with painful and dangerous delays while the leaders responsible for rebuilding learn on the job.

 

Many of Nepal's leaders are former rebels with no democratic governing experience. And after the Constitution is passed, this chaotic new Government then refused to accept global aid unless they could entirely control how it was spent. No-one was allowed to begin rebuilding until the National Reconstruction Authority said so. It only authorised rebuilding to begin a few months ago. Meanwhile, many Donors had packed up their pledges and left. Leaving Nepal in much the same state as when they came to the rescue a year ago.

 

GAGAN THAPA:  When donors were coming forward making pledges we had to capitalise on that particular time frame. We failed to form the National Reconstruction Authority in time. As we failed

to establish the NRA, then we also lost the ground. It was a kind of failure of all political parties.

 

Gagan Thapa is a rising star in Nepal's ruling Coalition and still he says by forcing relief money to be channelled through the National Reconstruction Authority, his own Government has helped pushed Nepal to the brink of survival.

 

GAGAN THAPA:  Even the Donors failed us, the Government failed us. Despite that, we are surviving. We are living with the hope and one of the reasons is that the community itself, the resilience.

 

Kamal Bhattarai is a reporter for the 'Kathmandu Post'. We met in the aftermath of the quake last year. Today Kamal has offered to show me around again and tell me more about all the things that have happened in the year since we met.

 

REPORTER:  How are you?  You look well. There is a lot of help that came in for rescue.

 

When I ask Kamal about the Constitution, he tells me whilst most cheered its creation, many did not.

 

KAMAL BHATTARAI (Translation): After the constitution passed there were high expectations that it would lead to political stability, but that really didn’t happen. Almost half of the population living in Nepal’s southern belt didn’t take the ownership of the constitution which invited political instability in the region.

 

Those who felt left out by the Constitution took to protest and neighbouring India took sides setting up a blockade that put the strangle hold on Nepal's petrol supply.

 

GAGAN THAPA:  Just after the earthquake we had almost three months of blockade, fuel crisis. Economists are saying that the effect, the impact is almost three time than that of the earthquake itself. So this was a kind of very unfortunate year for all us.

 

The 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck on April 25th was called a once in a century tragedy. But a little more than two weeks later, it happened again, this time reaching 7.2 technically an aftershock, but physically almost as destructive as the first earthquake.

 

GAGAN THAPA:  Just seventeen or eighteen days after the first earthquake it was the birthday of both my daughters, my daughters have the same birthday and we were just about to cut the cake, and then… as shock. The parents, the toddlers and the kids, we were just holding them, crying, panicking.  Even after the big earthquake and the second earthquake, and all the tremors and devastation, we are failing to learn lessons from it.

 

The second quake hit Nepal's remote communities especially hard. Kamal grew up around here and moved to Kathmandu for his work as a journalist. Now he is taking me to visit his village and his family home.

 

KAMAL BHATTARAI (Translation): We are heading towards my home in Syampate Simalchaur village in Kavrepalanchok district. That’s where my house is.

 

The tin shacks that we see on the roadside on the way, these are the conditions that many quake survivors are still living in today. Makeshift shanties with no clean water or proper sanitation and signs that no-one expects to be leaving for a rebuilt home any time soon.

 

Nepal's roads themselves are so mangled as to prevent aid from reaching many areas. But when we do reach Kamal's village, it's clear that many of the houses left standing are still too dangerous to entre, including his family home. His mother and father now sleep in a tin shanty out back beside the cow shed.

 

KAMAL BHATTARAI (Translation): The first floor is completely destroyed on the inside.

 

KHADAG BHATTARAI, FATHER (Translation): Everything there is damaged. It was just stone and mud and the floor up there is collapsing, they are starting to fall off. It is much dangerous inside than what it looks from outside

Kamal's father, Khadag Battarai built this house himself, he has lived in the village his whole life and said this was the hardest year in living memory.

 

KHADAG BHATTARAI (Translation): The villages were hit hardest by the earthquake because most houses here, unlike in cities, were built with stone and mud which aren’t as strong or safe as concrete.  So the villages were more unsafe.

 

With his family home destroyed, his parents reduced to sleeping in a shed and his government stumbling at every turn, I thought Kamal would want any future foreign Donors to work around Nepal's Government rather than working with them, but I was wrong. That's not what Kamal wants at all.

 

KAMAL BHATTARAI (Translation): Donor agencies need to come up with long term plans and work with the government to implement them. They need to raise the issues of transparency and corruption, holding the government accountable.

 

Kamal says Nepalis struggled for 60 years to pass a democratic Constitution. So what he really wants now is for this new Nepal to be given the chance to succeed.

 

KAMAL BHATTARAI (Translation): That’s why it is a great opportunity to make a better Nepal. But we still have the time and if our politicians seize this moment it is a historic opportunity for rebuilding Nepal.

 

Just recently in the National Reconstruction Authority finally opened its doors and began to put remaining foreign aid donations to work. Back in Kathmandu, Krishna says that life is starting to return to normal.

 

KRISHNA DHAREL: Obviously the reconstruction process is too slow here in our country and the government response is not adequate but now it's going back to normalcy and I must say.

 

REPORTER:  It is coming back to normal, is it? That's good news.

 

And a new building code was just written for modern guidelines for constructing more earthquake-resilient buildings. Krishna was able to use the codes to retrofit the remaining three floors of his home. Inside Krishna's house, it's looking far better than it did a year ago.

 

KRISHNA DHAREL:  I have to believe now because things are moving in a positive direction as the Reconstruction Authority has been set up and now all the political parties seem to have focused on the reconstruction works. So I'm cautiously optimistic things are going in the right direction.

 

It's not just Krishna that is rebuilding. Shanta Jirel and her maternal health network are reconstructing in the mountains. Meanwhile Shanta has seen patients every day and hasn't lost a single one.

 

SHANTA JIREL (Translation): Even in those conditions, I was able to help. Since the earthquake on this compound no-one had died.

Can you hear your baby’s breathing? Your baby’s heartbeat? 

 

The thing that has struck me most after a year spent meeting so many people affected by the quake is how most Nepalis really do believe that a better future lies ahead for them.

 

GAGAN THAPA:  The one reason is that the younger people, they give me hope.

 

KRISHNA DHAREL: I'm hoping that even if another earthquake strikes in our country, there won't be so many casualties that we had last year so we are hopeful.

 

KHADAG BHATTARAI (Translation): I think the country will be better than in the past. Now after the earthquake, this is the time to rebuild. The earthquake has given us an opportunity to rebuild a new and better Nepal.

 

I've heard this sentiment so often in the last year that's it changed, how I see hopeful moments like these. When people would tell me that they believed in new and better Nepal could grow amidst the rubble.

 

ANU SHRESTHA (Translation): The baby was born at 8.30 in the morning, the labour lasted, I think, four hours. It was very difficult but when I saw her I forgot about all the pain. I felt extremely happy and proud.

 

After the year that Nepal has survived, I can see more than just hope. I see courage.

 

 

 

Video journalist

AARON LEWIS

 

Story producer

MEGGIE PALMER

 

Fixer

BHRIKUTI RAI

 

Story editor

AARON LEWIS

 

Research

ALEX DE JONG

 

Translations

SAMEER GHIMIRE

BHRIKUTI RAI
RAJISH ARYAL

 

Original music

VICKI HANSEN

 

19^th April 2016