DUBAI|: When Dubai housemaid Laxmi Tamang, 21, called her mother Butama, 60, on Thursday evening, she assured her she was doing just fine ‘as always’ and readying for bed. On Saturday morning she got news that changed her life forever.
One of Laxmi’s neighbours from her village Bolegaon in Nepal’s remote Sindhupalchowk district had somehow managed to get through to her in Dubai to tell her that Butama had died in the 7.9 magnitude earthquake that hit the country that morning.
“I haven’t seen the destruction but it keeps playing in my head all the time. This one jolt took away our homes, our families and everything else we had. I lost my mother and my home,” Laxmi told XPRESS on Monday at a special gathering of the victims’ family members – most of them domestic workers and cooks - near Bur Dubai Creek. They were visibly numb trying to come to terms with the giant tragedy.
Buried alive
In Nepal’s worst earthquake in over 80 years, almost 4,400 people are estimated dead (as of April 28) but Laxmi says at least a hundred more are dead in her village alone – a nine-hour road trip from the capital Kathmandu.
“Some of them are buried alive, still deep in the ruins,” she says, alarmed how her people have been coping with no water, no electricity and no food for days.
In her village in the mountainous district – some 250km south east of Lamjung, the epicentre of Saturday’s earthquake – the nearest clinic, she says, comes after about a two-hour brisk journey on foot. “Cars and buses can’t go and walking is the only option. Helicopters have been to other parts of Nepal but not yet to Bolgaon perhaps because we are so much in the interior,” says Laxmi whose sister Manmaya, 30, is still untraceable. “She is perhaps somewhere buried inside the ruins and we don’t know yet if she is dead. Rescue workers have reached Nepal but no one’s hearing the cries in that corner of the world.”
Sangita Tamang, 23, another Dubai housemaid from the same village, also lost her mother in the quake. Her elder sister Rita, 27, also works as a housemaid in Dubai.
“Schools and hospitals were being built years but now we have taken one big step backward. We are completely cut off once again it seems and there’s no one to help us,” says Sangita.
“When I was back home in November and spent a month with her, I managed to get her eyes operated. She had a cataract and had almost lost her vision, but after the surgery she was fine and when I spoke to her last week, she said she was planning to get her routine check-up done in the capital Kathmandu soon,” Sangita recalls the last conversation she had with her mother Bamani who was 57.
With both sisters is Dubai, their brother is in the village to perform her last rites. “We can’t even think of going there now. What’s the point anyway,” she says in a trembling voice. Her two-storey house made of stone, mud and mortar has been razed to ground and one of her uncles has died too. “No one has news of his sons and their young children yet.”
The script reads horrifyingly the same for Babu, Deb, Narayan and a host of others – all from other nondescript villages in Sindhupalchowk where no one hears their people cry, at least as of now.
SUPPORT FROM DUBAI CARES
Dubai Cares, which has been active in Nepal since 2009, has pledged continued support to its partner buildOn with which it has implemented several programmes in the kingdom. “Dubai Cares has received encouraging news that its supported programmes in the far-western region have not been affected so far,” it said, adding that the local staff and volunteers are safe. “We remain vigilant as the situation stabilises and continue to hope for encouraging news as the country and its people recover from this tragedy.”
YOUSPEAK: Do you know of any victim of the Nepal earthquake?
