Over the last couple of months, before the lockdown, I had the privilege to join some of the Purnima team on visits to various beneficiaries of this UK Aid-funded program. It is heartening to note that clean drinking water has now been provided by them to over 200,000 people in the four worst earthquake-affected districts of Nepal and that this alone will make communities more resilient to climate change and to the difficulties and challenges presented by the pandemic. In addition, vulnerable people are receiving technical, material, and marketing support.
During March we drove out into Gajuri in Dhading district and firstly visited a widow who was needed help to complete her house. Flatland is so scarce that she’d started to build on an unstable sandy slope. She was such a sad woman. Illness had taken her husband, then a grown-up son was killed in a road accident, and her other son was driven to work abroad as employment opportunities were so poor for him.
Not only that, a grandchild had just been hit and badly injured on the newish dirt road running past their house. The road had encroached on the tiny amount of land she owned and she received no compensation. She had received some financial support from the government’s National Reconstruction Agency (NRA) but her money ran out before her home was complete.
We met another widow. Her son, when aged about nine, was badly injured in an accident involving a scooter. Scars suggested he’d been in intensive care on assisted ventilation. He is now in his twenties and his brain injury has left him with severe Parkinsonism which means he permanently needs to take medicines to help control his disabling shakes.
These medicines cost several thousand rupees a month. The burden of paying for these is huge. The boy’s aging mother does laboring work to feed them both and pay for the medicines. She has been trained and given a sewing machine but currently makes insufficient money from tailoring because her house is too far from potential clients.
Our next visit was to an undernourished older man who lived alone and was just surviving on sporadic income from laboring. He began to reconstruct his home with NRA grants but he too had run out of money before his house was completed. Happily, though, windows and doors, a kitchen, and roofing are now in place.
From Gajuri we drove on to Ajirkot gaun palika to meet a mother of three whose husband had become deeply depressed about his inability to provide for his family. He committed suicide three years before. Without him, life for the family became even more of a struggle and, while cutting grass to feed her cow, Parbati fell and sustained a bad leg fracture. Surgery on this put her into debt but didn’t free her of pain nor allow her to return to her usual activities. She received help to complete her house and from this more comfortable base she built up her business cooking up millet and distilling it into rakshi; selling this is now providing her main income.
Finally, I met another person with a heart-breaking story. A 52-year-old widower was a subsistence farmer in Nuwakot district. He lived in a small house that was completely destroyed in the 2015 earthquake although he was unharmed in the quake. He applied for relief payments from the NRA to rebuild his house but about a year ago while he was working on the reconstruction he fell about 10 meters and sustained a spinal injury that rendered him wheelchair dependent.
He too has been supported by the program so that he could complete his house including the addition of a ramp for the wheelchair, appropriate toilet arrangements, and windows. Counseling was also organized for him and he was helped through being set up to raise chickens. This has not only provided him with an income from meat sales but it has given this traumatized man focus and purpose.
It was sobering to meet this series of accident victims and appreciate the burden such severe injuries have on ordinary people, especially if they have few financial resources. Many accidents involve vehicles in Nepal. Especially away from the larger towns, few motorcyclists wear helmets, underage boys drive motorbikes, and cars speed around blind bends so toddlers are readily hit. Globally around 93% of deaths on the roads occur in resource-poor regions like Nepal and there is an untold burden of life-altering injuries. Here too, steep inclines, even close to homes, also mean there is great potential for falls so that far too many people sustain significant injuries. And when that happens there may not be much support.
Jane Wilson-Howarth is based in Nepal and is the author of eight books; her website is www.wilson-howarth.com.
For more about Purnima visit https://www.purnimanepal.com
