Life After Twin Earthquakes: Why Nepal’s Future Must Begin With Food
Few countries evoke such awe and reverence as Nepal. Its natural wonders include eight of the world’s highest peaks, one of the planet’s deepest ravines — an enormous gorge carved over a millennia by flowing river water — and pristine glacial lakes that reflect the country’s majestic scenery skyward.
Nestled between India and Tibet and ringed by the Himalayas, Nepal quite literally sits at the top of the world. It is here that one can climb — or, perhaps more accurately, attempt to climb — the planet’s tallest mountain, Sagarmatha, otherwise known as Mount Everest.
Each year, the tiny once-forbidden kingdom draws millions of adventure-seekers in search of a transcendent travel experience. Despite such a high volume of visitors, Nepal can still seem like one of the last unexplored places on Earth.
But the country’s serene landscape belies the danger that exists underground. Much of Nepal’s natural beauty derives from its location atop one of the most seismically hazardous regions on the planet. The Himalayas were formed by the clashing of tectonic plates along a massive underground fault line that lies beneath.
So when a sudden release of pressure within the fault line erupted last spring, it burst its way to the surface in a deadly, earth-shattering blast.
It would be Nepal’s worst earthquake in 80 years.
Paradise Lost
The quake that struck Nepal on April 25, 2015 registered 7.8 on the Richter scale — approximately 16 times more powerful than the earthquake that struck Haiti in 2005. According to the New York Times, it carried half the force of an atomic bomb.
A second earthquake hit 17 days later, claiming in total more than 9,000 lives and leaving more than 3 million people homeless — roughly the population of Philadelphia and Phoenix combined. The homes and livelihoods of millions of Nepalese collapsed in an instant. Hundreds of thousands of homes, schools, hospitals, businesses were gone in a matter of minutes. Gone too were the nation’s ancient sacred temples.
“In addition to people losing lives and property, they lost their cultural and religious bearings because things that were important to them in their daily spiritual life were completely leveled,” says Richard Ragan, who oversaw WFP’s earthquake response effort in Nepal.
The ruin of last spring’s earthquake offered a tragic lesson in contrasts. Against a backdrop of stunning snow-capped peaks, families cremated their loved ones in open fields as colorful prayer flags of red, yellow and blue fluttered in the wind. Cries of anguish echoed across massive mountains of granite and sandstone that had only recently been rocked to the core.
Scientists later discovered that the earthquake had moved Mount Everest by 1.2 inches. The ground beneath the capital of Kathmandu, meanwhile, was found to have shifted by as much as 9 feet.
In the weeks that followed the first earthquake, the country experienced more than 430 aftershocks. On May 12th, the second, 7.3-magnitude earthquake struck.
News reports described how Nepalese children were afraid to sleep indoors, preferring instead to sleep under the open sky. It felt safer that way.
Hunger As The First Emergency
The first few days after the initial earthquake were among the hardest of Manbahadur Praja’s life.
“I spent three nights at the banks of the nearby river under the open skies with no food,” the Nepalese farmer, who lived more than 90 minutes from the nearest road in the Makwanpur District, later recalled.
After accounting for his loved ones and neighbors, Manbahadur took stock of the earthquake’s economic toll. In addition to destroying his family’s home, the calamity had laid waste to their entire livelihood. All of their goats and chickens were killed, their field of broom grass ruined, and more than 550 pounds of stored millet — a year’s worth of food — gone in an instant.
When natural disaster strikes, hunger becomes the most immediate threat. In the first month after the quakes, the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) conducted a major food security assessment to determine how many families required immediate food assistance. The agency’s initial tally came to roughly 1.4 million people.
Yet hunger threatened Nepal even before the earthquakes hit. Many families, especially those living in rural areas, depend on subsistence farming to survive. As a result of widespread poverty, an estimated 5 million Nepalese suffer from undernourishment on a regular basis. Living hand to mouth means zero safety nets when catastrophe strikes.
Worse still, the country’s rural poor were among the hardest hit when the earthquakes struck, especially in its central and western mountainous regions — both hard-to-reach areas already cut off from the rest of the world.
Crossing The Toughest Terrain
Nepal’s mountainous topography is notoriously hard to trespass, but last spring’s earthquakes presented even more challenges for WFP’s emergency response. The threat of aftershocks and landslides made trails impassable and prevented helicopters from landing in high altitudes.
And it wasn’t just the rugged terrain that made reaching earthquake survivors so challenging. The country’s legendary remoteness and undeveloped infrastructure meant what few roads existed were either blockaded or demolished by the twin temblors.
And because Nepal’s weather is no less extreme than its geography, blizzards, torrential monsoons and blinding fog only added to the logistical challenges of delivering humanitarian relief to survivors in need.
“It’s an incredibly tough place to operate even under good conditions,” says Ragan. “So when you throw earthquake and aftershocks and rainy season and destroyed infrastructure that was already weak on top of it into the mix, it just becomes incredibly difficult.”
But centuries of dealing with such harsh terrain also offered a unique solution. Years of living and surviving in the foothills and cliffs of the Himalayas — and later catering to foreign tourists eager to experience the precarious yet seemingly otherworldly landscape themselves — had created a bustling industry of local porters renown for their mountaineering expertise — a vital resource that had yet to be utilized by the international humanitarian community.
So WFP decided to tap into Nepal’s most ancient and traditional means of transportation, thus launching a logistics operation truly tailored to the country’s environment. The approach was initially dubbed “Operation Mountain Express.”
Introducing Operation Mountain Express
Less than three weeks after the second earthquake hit, WFP set about hiring local porters to help distribute aid to areas inaccessible by either road or helicopter. Working with the country’s Trekking Agents Association and the Nepal Mountaineering Association, the agency identified experienced porters in the four targeted districts of Gorkha, Dhading, Sindupalchok and Dolakha.
Each porter could carry up to 66 pounds of relief supplies. And it wasn’t just food. They delivered shelter material like tarps, health kits, and basic medicines. Porters also supplied vital information about the scope of the damage and the extent of humanitarian need in areas where no means of outside communication existed.
Using local porters didn’t just provide relief in an impossible situation. It also provided vital jobs for those who relied on a tourism industry that had literally collapsed overnight.
Yet this operation had its own set of challenges. “It wasn’t easy to manage that many people and it was not without risk,” Ragan, himself an avid climber, later recalled. “There were injuries where people got hit by falling debris, people fell into rivers, all kinds of challenges physical in nature. But these are challenges many of these porters have already faced on a daily basis.”
“This wasn’t somebody coming from the outside and trying to figure out what’s wrong. These were mountain people from these communities who understood the suffering and where people were coming from.”
Because the earthquake struck during the height of the climbing season, dozens of elite mountain climbers who had planned to hike Mount Everest also ended up joining the effort, including well-known mountaineers like Kasha Rigby and Don Bowie. They were joined by other visitors-turned-volunteers, including a group of U.S. Army Green Beret soldiers who had been undergoing high-altitude training in Nepal when the quake hit.
From Response To Recovery
Four months after the second temblor struck, the porter operation shifted from damage assessment and immediate distribution of emergency relief supplies to long-term recovery. This included rehabilitating or re-routing safe passageways by widening trails as well as building containers made of rocks or concrete to support unstable slopes. Culverts were also created for drainage during the rainy season and bridges and causeways were reconstructed.
All of these efforts were labor-intensive jobs that required enormous manpower — or in many cases, womenpower.
Just ask Sachi Maya Thamir and Sushila Kami, two women from Dolokha who found employment as porters through WFP. When they learned of the opportunity to join agency’s efforts, both registered with the Nepal Mountaineering Association to earn income and support their family.
“Both our houses collapsed in the earthquake, but luckily we were outside in the fields when it happened,” Sachi Maya recalled of the day the first earthquake hit.
They lost almost everything in the disaster, except what mattered most — their children.
Today, with the income she earned as a porter, Sushila says she can now afford her children’s notebooks and exam fees.
And by restoring access to markets, hospitals and schools, the operation also revitalized local economies.
Opening A New Chapter
Throughout the operation, more than 25,000 men and women like Sachi Maya Tahmir and Sushila Kami stepped up to serve as porters for WFP.
Today, they remain a fixture of Nepalese communities, especially among those who live far removed within the country’s tall mountain peaks.
“Porters in Nepal are like long range truckers in America, or the train service,” Ragan said. “They are the economic engine that supports life in these high places.”
Since the first earthquake struck last April, Nepal has weathered monsoons. It has survived the long winter months. It has watched two planting and harvest seasons come and go.
The country continues to rebuild and recover, though hardships remain.
“People who were [worse] off before the quake are the ones who lost the most,” said Pippa Bradford, WFP’s Country Director in Nepal. “Ensuring that support targets these households is vitally important so that no one gets left further behind.”
While communities across Nepal commemorate the first anniversary of the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that devastated so many lives this month, it’s fitting that April also marks the start of the New Year in this small but mighty nation.
As Bradford noted in a letter to fellow aid workers, today marks the close of a challenging chapter in Nepal’s history — and the beginning of an even stronger and more resilient one on the horizon.
— M.J. Altman, World Food Program USA
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