Nature Disposes

"From what we've seen on the ground, the need is great and widespread and not limited to the urban centre of Kathmandu."
"The most difficult task right now is reaching people in remote areas who have been cut off by the earthquake -- from communications, from roads, from all their normal routines of receiving food and other supplies."
"The needs are great and the response has been quick. We are looking at a large population of people facing profound needs in the coming days, weeks and months."
"We are in early days still. We are still assessing where the greatest needs are and where the pockets of people who need help most can be found."
It is a country that has suffered a lot and has made progress in some areas, but this is a really significant setback."
Steve Taravella, senior spokesman, World Food Programme

Many earthquake victims are having to wait for relief supplies

"It was the most difficult three metres I have walked in my life. It was like trying to walk on a fast-moving rowing boat."
"The walls around the road looked like they were ocean waves; the buildings looked like rubber ..."
"People on the street started crying and crowds gathered as everyone tried to escape falling buildings."
Sakun Gajurel, Nepal-based UN aid worker

"Currently there is no electricity. Communication lines are also down. Many people have been displaced from their homes and spent the night out in the open. There are many people injured and hospitals are unable to hand the situation."
Mariko Tanaka, country director, ChildFund Nepal

Pierre-Ane Dube, 31, slept outside a hotel on the sidewalk. The Canadian said she had experienced the best time of her life on a trek to Everest base camp. And now she was experiencing the worst imaginable thing she could ever have been exposed to. "We can't reach the [Canadian] embassy. We want to leave. We are scared. There is no food. We haven't eaten a meal since the earthquake and we don't have any news about what's going on."

The outcome of the devastating earthquake that hit Nepal a week ago has left almost seven thousand people dead, and there is no longer any hope that any more people will be rescued from the suffocating, maiming rubble that was once buildings and homes where people went about their ordinary lives. Little wonder that many people now complain that foreign aid is slow coming in. Nepalese customs has not been lifted to allow foreign aid unimpeded entry to the country.

This is what Malaysia did after the dreadful tsunami that took so many lives, and caused international humanitarian aid agencies to rush in to offer assistance to yet another government unable to cope with such a devastating natural disaster. In that instance, Malaysia imposed customs tariffs on humanitarian aid coming into the country; an immorally absurd money-grab that cost aid agencies in imposed taxes, sidelining funding that could have been used to aid people, not enrich their incapable government.



Without bureaucratic foul-ups in a country that has been unable to provide the most basic search-and-rescue missions the huge task of treating the tens of thousands of injured, of finding shelter for over a million displaced people, of providing potable water and food for the hungry would be enough to tax even the resources of a well-regulated and -functioning first-world country. And Nepal is definitely not that.

Military personnel abandoned earlier attempts to land helicopters in some of the more devastated areas. No fewer than 70 smaller earthquakes, known as after-shocks, continued in the days following the devastating 7.8-quake that shattered so many structures and buried people alive. Stretching east and west from Kathmandu along the middle mountain range of the Himalayas, the devastation was overwhelming.

There were reports of villages where 75 percent of buildings crumbled in the quake, and all contact has been cut off, since. Funeral pyres from cremations have smudged the skies in Nepal. "The hills all came down", said Sumzah Lama, nursing her youngest daughter at the time the earthquake struck, killing her husband and three other children, in a village near the Tibetan border.

"There is nothing left to go back to, everything is destroyed. Everything was moving and smashed apart", said Karchon Tamang, from the village of Langtang, who had been evacuated by helicopter Sunday. Fear of aftershocks has meant that tens of thousands of families are resigned to spending their nights outdoors in the cold Himalayan nights. Rain events are not viewed as adding any comfort to their unspeakable plight.