My heart bleeds for the country and people of Nepal, my adopted country. As if we weren’t poor enough, as if we weren’t facing difficulties enough, as if the road ahead wasn’t going to be long and tough enough as it was. As if we don’t already have only 10 hours of power in 24, as if we don’t already have avalanches that bury mountaineers and trekkers, mudslides, rockfalls, buses plunging into the river from precipitous and too-narrow roads snaking along the valleys, as if we don’t already have acute skills shortages, poor infrastructure, and political mismanagement.
Now we have had a catastrophic 7.9 scale earthquake which has killed over 5000 people, made thousands homeless, destroyed beautiful old buildings, damaged the infrastructure even more and destroyed a vitally important sector of the economy – tourism.
But even though I have survived this disaster, the real damage to me, in the aftermath of this event, is that all the work I have done here for the past year or so seems to have been in vain.
I am SO TIRED of having to face another crisis, of having to draw on my dwindling reserves of energy to make the effort to survive, to overcome the problems and continue to live in this beautiful land. I am conscious that other people are dependent on me for their living. I have made huge efforts to meet this responsibility, but now, the earthquake has knocked away my reasons for working here, because if I cannot pay the girls for their work, if we cannot sell our paper products to tourists who are not here, there is nothing to do except stop work, close the Elephant Dung Paper Shop and go home. It is as stark and bleak as that.
I am so tired… I need to take a long time to sleep… to recover my strength before I can be of use to anyone else.
Perhaps tomorrow I will think of ways in which we can continue to work, to help local families and the economy here in Chitwan. But today, the problems seem huge and insurmountable, and my heart bleeds.
C. Tim Taylor April 2015