More then three years after Nepal’s deadly earthquake, thousands of rural families are still struggling to rebuild their homes and their lives.
On April 25, 2015, just before noon, Nepal was ravaged by a series of devastating earthquakes that injured over 15,000 people and left more than 9,000 dead.
That morning in Kathmandu, Sohan Nepali, a Dalit laborer from Nuwakot, tried desperately to call his family back home.
“I was so afraid for them. Again, and again I tried calling my mother’s phone, but there was no answer. I believed they had all died.” Sohan recalled. “But then finally, after many tries, my mother picked up.”
To survive, Sohan’s family huddled under an archway at the entrance of their home. No one was injured, but the house the family had lived in for over two generations was reduced to rubble.
The earthquakes tore through the Kathmandu Valley like a rhinoceros through paper walls. Early estimates put the structural damages anywhere between five and ten billion dollars, an amount more than a quarter of Nepal’s annual GDP.
In less than 24 hours, hundreds of thousands of people became homeless. Believing they would only be there temporarily, Sohan and his family constructed a small shelter out of wood and corrugated tin, using tattered blue tarps to insulate them from the biting mountain winds at night.
Today, nearly three years after the earthquake, Sohan’s family still lives in that same “temporary” shelter.
And the Nepali family is not alone — their situation is shared by hundreds of thousands of fellow Nepalese citizens; survivors, trapped in a cycle of poverty that makes it near-impossible for them to rebuild their lives. Compounding this problem is the fact that thousands are still waiting on the aid promised to them by their government.
At the end of 2016, Sohan and his family applied for a cash grant through the National Reconstruction Authority, commonly known in Nepal as the NRA — an organization created to oversee reconstruction and relief operations. The NRA distributed payments for reconstruction in three installments.
A few months after the earthquake, the family suffered another major setback. Sohan’s cousin Raju, who had been working as a laborer in Malaysia, lost several fingers in an accident and was forced to return to Nepal. The money Raju had been sending from overseas had been the family’s primary source of income, without it, their situation became even more dire.
“Without Raju sending money from overseas, we barely had anything,” Sohan lamented. “I could not sleep because I worried about how my family will eat, or how will we get through the winter.”
The family had little choice but to spend the money they had received from the NRA on basic needs like food, clothing and minor repairs for their shelter. Though they have applied, they are still waiting on the second installment payment from the NRA.
Many critics of the NRA feel the organization has over bureaucratized the grant payment process — a critical service for many low-income, and poor Nepali citizens, who can’t depend on private banks for the low-interest loans needed to finance house construction.
In an interview with Spotlight Magazine, in August of 2017, Dr. Prabin Manandhar, the country director of The Lutheran World Foundation, a leading NGO operating in Nepal, expressed what many Nepalese felt about the way the NRA was operating, “The NRA does not understand that earthquake response is humanitarian emergency response that needed to fast-track decisions and support systems. NRA implementation is even slower than community development works during normal period. This is the reason why most of the houses under the government grant support have not been completed.”
A recent study conducted by the Asian Development Bank, and funded by the Japanese Fund for Poverty Reduction, found that 48 percent of those who qualified for the NRA’s grants had not begun rebuilding their homes, and that only 25 percent had fully rebuilt.
“The NRA needs a better approach to financing and budgetary services. They need to begin to address the underlying issues of poverty in Nepal by investing in things that help Nepalese generate income. Things like farming equipment and business cooperatives,” said Dr. Nara Hari Dhakal, the Chairman of the Center for Empowerment and Development, Nepal, who specializes in micro-financing and community banking.
“What is needed to help Nepal fully recover are things like skills training and microcredit. This will allow poor families to rebuild their livelihoods along with their homes.”
The only way Sohan feels like he can help his family now is by taking whatever opportunities he can for work. Each morning he scours Kathmandu looking for odd jobs.
He says that on a lucky day he can earn anywhere from 200 to 400 Nepalese rupees — the equivalent of two to four U.S. dollars. Whatever money he doesn’t use for rent or food in Kathmandu he sends back to his family in Nuwakot.
Three years after a deadly 7.8 magnitude earthquake destroyed his home, Sohan is still living in the aftershock.