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2015 earthquake

Day 5: Bare Hands

Report 21 of 23

A field of stone and timber rubble where houses once stood, with a bare door frame left standing upright and hills in the distance.
  1. The day began early at 6:15 AM when Kedar dai, a Deerwalk driver, arrived. We helped drop relief items gathered at home to Nagarik Hospital, where a family member was working.
  2. We returned to the office with a huge cache of clothes donated by people from Baneswor, to be handed over to Sudan, a Deerwalk employee collecting clothes from all Deerwalkers.
  3. Around 1:00 PM we left for relief work, inspired by a Times of India report about Nepalese cleaning Bhaktapur with bare hands. We bought around two dozen helmets, 25 pairs of gloves and some brooms. The site was totally devastated, and a person from the Department of Archaeology asked us to arrange the broken bricks neatly for the restoration process, since the police were occupied with retrieving trapped idols. We worked for around four hours with intermittent breaks and left around 6:00 PM, returning to the office around 7:45 PM. It was physically taxing but satisfying work, and the students began coordinating video updates from home. Around Rs 10,000 was spent on gloves and cheap helmets, with about Rs 3,500 of that on food.

Source: www.blakeleyfoundation.org

Reports and photographs are taken from the Nepal Earthquake Relief Fund gallery published by The Blakeley Foundation.

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