A personal ordeal from Delhi into the 7.9 Magnitude Earthquake that shook Kathmandu.
April 25, 2015. Our country’s worst nightmare is here, with clouds of debris, despair and confusion everywhere.
I didn’t think much of it when my cousin called to ask “Did you feel the earthquake?” He was just down the road from me, so I replied “Huh? What earthquake?” and shrugged it off because I didn’t feel it at all.
*a minute later*My mom calls me and I hand the phone to Dad… and that’s when I knew it wasn’t just a little tremor.
I couldn’t make out what she was saying, but I could sense the fear in my mom’s voice.
Earthquake!
I’ve never heard my mom sound like that. She’s known for her sweet voice and being the life of every party with her Bollywood dance moves and contagious laugh. But today, mom wasn’t joking around.
After listening to her explain the situation to Dad, and his replies were a series of “Oh no!”, “Oh God!”, “Oh ho” and “Arey”, as he listened intently. After Dad made sure that Mom is alright with “acha theek hai, magar aap kaise ho?” he tells her to go outside with the neighbors, and reassures her that “it’ll all be okay!”
As we rush home, Dad gives me the details about the TV falling onto the bedroom floor and paintings falling off the walls. We arrive home and Dad turns on the TV to get the latest from the news. As always, I turn to Twitter for my real-time crowd-sourced information. I go to search for “earthquake”, but I didn’t even have to type it out, the hashtag #earthquake was already trending. *click*
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/a on Twitter
I scrolled through the real-time Twitter stream of reactions, updates, prayers, PSA (public service announcements) and, of course, photos!
My heart sank when I saw this tweet from @oliverdarcy.
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Oliver Darcy on Twitter
It’s at this moment I realized that this earthquake is the one we’d always feared in Kathmandu.
We knew the high risk of earthquakes in the region due to the Indian and Asian tectonic plates grinding against each other. But would it happen in our lifetime?
It wasn’t a question of “if another big earthquake will strike Kathmandu”, but rather “When?”
Sadly we got the answer to that question today. It’s today.
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Siobhan Heanue on Twitter
I took these photos an hour apart.
As the minutes trickled by and tweets streamed in, the news out of the Himalayan Kingdom, erm… i mean, the Himalayan Republic, looked more dire.
Shocking photos of the Kathmandu Darbar Square (behind New Road), Patan Durbar Square, Bhaktapur and Dharara (white tower) in ruins.
This is a nightmare isn’t it? It must be.
Is Dharara really no more?
Wait a second…
We haven’t been able to reach mom for the past hour. She’s not answering any of the phones, and neither are the neighbors.
We scramble to make phone calls to anyone who could possibly have an update. But without any success…
*one hour later*A call from an unknown number… It’s mom. (Phew!)
“We’re all ok. I’m with my friends and some of our neighbors. We’re all sitting on a big ground outdoors. We had dinner and snacks too! And didn’t have access to a phone earlier.”
As the West wakes up to the news from Nepal, the international publications rush the story to their front pages, and it’s on the front page of reddit and digg too.
The personal stories and memories of Nepal from past travelers:
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Chris Sacca on Twitter
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Amitabh Bachchan on Twitter
After a few hours outside, Mom walks back home and gives us some unexpectedly positive news. There is minimal damage to our home, the building is structurally sound, and the TV that fell off the cabinet and hit the ground during the initial M7.9 quake was still working.
There is no running water or electricity.
The news on the ground just kept getting worse.
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Wall Street Journal on Twitter
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Shiwani Neupane on Twitter
After a long and difficult day, Mom went to bed around 9pm. I wished her a good night!
At 10:15pm, we got a troubling phone call from a friend in India who just spoke to mom. Powerful aftershocks! Mom and her friends rushed out into the street after the M4.9 tremor at 9:57PM local time… and spend several minutes outside.
The magnitude of the aftershocks is hovering between 4.5 and 5.5, and striking at random intervals.
I talked to mom after she came back indoors after the M4.9 aftershock around 10:30pm. So far so good.
I received an email from my high school friend in Kathmandu at 12:41AM:
“All good but scary. out in the open at the moment. just wasn’t able torespond earlier”
I doubt anyone in Kathmandu and in Nepal will get any REM sleep tonight. But to make matters worse, it’s after 1AM now, and it’s started to rain.
There are at least tens of thousands of people sleeping outdoors in open fields, football grounds, neighborhood parks, and anyplace away from the buildings.
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Ujjwal Acharya on Twitter
GRAPHIC: Don’t click this if you can’t watch. This gives you an idea of how most residential building are built in Nepal. Each floor is a heap of concrete and bricks layered on top of each other, like pancakes.
https://twitter.com/pahilopost/status/591996725843263488
GRATITUDE
I’m grateful that we have multiple communications platforms at our disposal today — the land line, the cell phone, and with seamless calling with Whatsapp and Viber if you’re still online too.
I’m grateful for Twitter. (I can’t stress this enough.)
I’m grateful for community.
It takes a village to raise a child, but it also takes a village to raise a village.
It reminds me of Desmond Tutu’s quote on Ubuntu:
Ubuntu is the essence of being a person. It means that we are people through other people. We can’t be fully human alone. We are made for interdependence, we are made for family. Indeed, my humanity is caught up in your humanity, and when your humanity is enhanced mine is enhanced as well. I can’t be all that I can’t be, unless you are all that you can be. I AM BECAUSE YOU ARE.
Hug your dear ones a little closer tonight, or remember to say I love you before you hang up.
Tomorrow, I’m flying to Kathmandu and will hug my mom once again, but this time a little tighter and for a little longer.