Meeting need in Nepal

‘One of their phrases was, “Thank you for coming to our country and feeling our pain.” ’

More than a month on from his time in Nepal responding to April’s devastating earthquake with The Salvation Army’s International Emergency Services (IES) team, the memories are still raw for Captain Ralph Hargest and Major David Bennett.

Ralph is one of three Salvation Army officers from New Zealand who were part of IES team that responded after the 7.8 magnitude earthquake on 25 April, along with Major David Bennett and Captain Perry Bray.

The team’s work included delivery of food to more than 11,000 families, distributing 1000 tents, helping 300 families build rudimentary homes and looking after eight camps for displaced people. They also gave out 4000 quilts for winter, provided hygiene packs and school supplies and built septic-tanks and toilets, but Ralph and David say it was the people of Nepal who captured their hearts.

David travelled to Nepal in June, spending 11 weeks with the IES team managing logistics for the distribution of food and tents and representing the Army at some meetings with other NGOs to coordinate their work.

Ralph was deployed in July and spent two months overseeing the camps for displaced people that the Army was asked to take over looking after. He also organised assessments and deliveries done by helicopter and helped with distributions. Ralph underwent international disaster relief training with IES last year and this was his first overseas emergency work. The poverty, stories and gratitude of the people, who did not complain in the face of some appalling situations, was confronting, he says.

‘I wore sunglasses all the time, because there were some situations that brought a tear to your eye. The sunnies were there to keep the sun out sometimes, and at others to hide the emotions.’ It was David’s second overseas mission with IES; he worked with Habitat for Humanity in Samoa following its 2009 earthquake and tsunami. However, Nepal presented a whole new set of challenges including the language barrier, bureaucracy, poor infrastructure, and the heat, intense humidity and rain of the monsoon season. The complete disregard of all road rules and the lax approach some locals took to health and safety also took some getting used to, he says.

‘We had a guy who came to fill up our water tank. He had to fill it with an electric pump. He walked in with his cable and just stuck two bare wires straight into the plug!’

The IES team members slept on mattresses on the floor at a Salvation Army centre in Kathmandu where the Army supports and provides job training to women vulnerable to trafficking. They travelled widely across a country David describes as beautiful and rugged. Nepal is among the 10 poorest countries in the world, but with very resilient people who put a great emphasis on education, he says.

Serving through partnership

The nine projects they worked on were decided by a team at Salvation Army International Headquarters, after consulting with staff and other agencies. They partnered with other charities on some projects and worked closely with agencies, including the United Nations, to coordinate work.

Some of their main work was to help villages near the epicentre of the earthquakes, especially providing food and hygiene kits in the early weeks. Visiting the villages was a sobering experience, David says. ‘In most of the villages near the epicentre you wouldn’t see anything standing. Most of the buildings were flattened and the ones that were standing couldn’t be used.’

Each village had to be visited to work out the needs in the area before a distribution could be organised. But because of the language barrier, getting to a village could be confusing, David says.

‘A couple of times I would look up the village on Google Maps and then go to visit MAF (Mission Aviation Fellowship) and Fish Tail, who were our helicopter company. I would tell them the village and they’d say, “We can’t find a village with that name on the map.” They’d look up the coordinates and find they had a different name.’ This also made it hard at times to get information needed for the forms they had to fill out, tracking where every item went.

On an initial visit, a team member would collect information, including how many families were in an area, what the health and hygiene situation was, if there was a school and how many children attended, and what the greatest needs were that the Army could address. Later, they worked with each Village District Council, along with the Nepalese trucking companies they hired and a local supermarket company they bought some food from, to organise the delivery location, date and time.

The huge logistical effort continued for the actual distribution, where people were divided into the wards they came from. An assigned ward leader would call a family member forward to get their supplies and sign or put a fingerprint as a receipt.

For food distributions, each family received 30 kilograms of rice, five kg of dahl, one kg of salt and three litres of cooking oil. In some places, the Army also delivered tarpaulins, hygiene kits and school supplies.

Difficult conditions

Their largest food distribution was to 3000 families and took 12 large trucks to transport. Others were for anything from 100 to 1500 families, Ralph says. On some trips they had to switch to smaller trucks part way through the journey because of the road conditions. Other villages could only be accessed by helicopter, and in one case they hired a team of mules to transport the supplies.

Travelling on dirt roads in the height of the monsoon season made driving difficult. It took six hours to drive to one village 170 kilometres from Kathmandu, David says. In many places, the rain or earthquakes had caused landslides across the road and the team regularly had to help digging paths and clearing rocks. Their Nepalese truck drivers were essential to the relief effort, working hard and keeping them safe in treacherous situations, David says.

‘One time stands out. We were coming home in the dark. The drivers always wanted to be off the mountain before it was dark, but this time we were late. There were no road markings, it was dark and raining and the windscreen wipers stopped working. We were up in the clouds, so your lights reflect back at you. That wasn’t a pleasant drive back!’

Getting to the villages wasn’t just tough for the IES teams. Ralph and David were astonished by the efforts of some Nepalese, usually women, who came from more remote villages that could only be accessed by walking. Some would walk up to four hours to a village, load up to 50kg of supplies into a sling on their back held by a strap across their forehead, and set straight off home.

On average, the camps Ralph was overseeing housed 100 families of five to six people each, but some families were blended, with parents who had lost children in the earthquake taking in orphaned children, he says.

The aim of the camp work was to ensure people had adequate food, shelter and sanitation, and get them back to their homes, or help them build semi-permanent corrugated iron and concrete shelters. ‘At one of the camps, the people I met were all downcast, they had no shelter. When we’d finished building shelters for them, they threw a party for us. There were people crying when they heard we were going. The emotion was incredible—the gratitude, I have never seen that before.’

Resilience and gratitude

Nepal is a mainly Hindu country; just over one per cent of the country is Christian. The Salvation Army has worked in Nepal since 2010, but is known there as ‘The Salvation Mission’, because there used to be a rebel group in the country that called itself ‘The Salvation Army’. The IES team always carried Red Shields on their trucks and uniforms, and Ralph says they were confused with the rebel group and threatened once.

But both men say the Nepalese were extremely grateful for the Army’s work. Some staff from the trucking and supermarket companies they worked with asked how they could join The Salvation Army in Nepal and other people they met asked to keep in touch via email and Facebook, David says. ‘Whenever we went to make a distribution, there was a ceremony. You’d get silk scarves draped round your neck and get flowers. We got so many scarves!’

For Ralph, a distribution on his second day really brought home what the work was about. ‘We had a team of six and got there before the trucks arrived. Then the trucks and all the people started arriving. There were hundreds, then thousands of people who don’t speak your language. It was mayhem. The first hour [each time] you’d start getting a little desperate. You’d take a deep breath and send up a prayer and something would happen. On this day, a teacher came and said, “I will interpret for you.” ‘

Afterwards, through lots of smiling and hand gestures, we were able to talk. He dropped into the conversation that his daughter had died in the earthquake. She was only three. He said it so nonchalantly it caught me off guard. It hit me—we’re not just here to tick boxes and give out stuff.’

Brothers forever

Work for the IES team began at sunrise, about 4:30 am, and finished when it got dark or sometimes long into the night, but seeing lives changed kept them energised, Ralph says. ‘It was a real privilege to be able to help people who had lost so much, being able to put a smile on their faces [and] help them get back on their feet.’

People such as a man who helped organise a food distribution and invited Ralph and the other team members for a meal afterwards, sharing his limited provisions from a shack built with wood from his destroyed home.

His voice breaking, Ralph describes the scene as they walked back to their trucks afterwards. ‘We walked past this collapsed stone structure, and three or four minutes later the guy leading us stopped. There was a burnt patch in front of us that he was staring at. That was where he’d burnt the clothes of his six-week-old daughter and his mother. They’d died in the house we’d just walked by. He shared the tradition that he’d burnt their clothes and mourned for 13 days. His wife was badly injured and in hospital in Kathmandu.

‘He’s Hindu; we’re Christian, but none of that mattered,’ Ralph adds. ‘We said to him, “We know a God who knows how to suffer,” and we prayed with him. He was really appreciative and said it was such a help because he hadn’t had anyone to talk to. He said, “From now on, we will be brothers forever.” ’

The IES mission will end in the second week of November, but three staff will remain for three years, working with the Army in Nepal on ongoing projects.

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by Robin Raymond (c) 'War Cry' magazine, 14 November 2015, pp 5-7.
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