Survivors Return to Salvage Memories

Days after a wall of water and debris ripped through Nepal, Shanti Lamichhane sat on a fruit crate in the dirt where her village once stood, staring at what remained of her home. She told AFP she was waiting for bulldozers to finish clearing the path so she could return. "I want to retrieve a few things, but it is not just about that," she said. "All my memories are there too."

Across Nepal's flood disaster zone, survivors are returning to villages reduced to mud and debris, searching for belongings, documents, and fragments of lives swept away in minutes. The village of Dhunge, once home to roughly 150 families, now lies in ruins, reduced to a swampy expanse with an ominous rotting stench — one of dozens of settlements obliterated by the Himalayan floods.

Hari Prasad Rimal returned to his home in the village of Devighat, hoping to recover treasured belongings — not least some jewellery and cash. He brought back a photograph of his daughter. "It was pasted on a chest that was floating," said Mr. Rimal, 44. "There was nothing else I could retrieve, but that photo also means a lot." His warehouse business, a few kilometres upstream, remained inaccessible, he said. Drone images taken by a volunteer showed only mud and debris where it had stood. "It is gone, but I should not complain perhaps," he said. "At least, every[one]..."

Navraj Upretti waded through knee-high sludge towards his home, flanked by two rescuers carrying shovels. An hour-long search yielded documents belonging to a neighbour. Santosh Adhikari was in Kathmandu when the deluge swept away his home in Dhunge; he returned three days later to find nothing.

Workers clearing silt from the flood-struck region occasionally come across personal belongings, including gold. Ayushman Kuinkel, a rescuer from the Nepal Scouts youth, said "the debris is still knee-high and there is a stench in many places" and "one knows that there are also likely bodies under it."

The Disaster and Its Toll

The disaster struck on Wednesday morning on the China-Nepal border, caused by a glacial collapse, according to the S. Geological Survey. The icy torrent downstream drove boulders with its sheer force, cutting a swathe through Nepal from north to south.

As of Sunday morning, figures from Nepal and China put the total number of missing close to 3,000, with 691 bodies recovered. The Guardian reported that by Saturday morning the toll of the missing had risen to almost 3,000, in both Nepal and Tibet. Nepal has recovered 669 bodies, but many remote areas have only been accessed by army helicopters on the hunt for survivors, The Guardian reported.

Rescuers said it was too difficult to assess how many more people might be buried beneath the mud. In the Nepalese city of Chitwan, the morgues have been overrun by the sheer number of bodies and a makeshift building has been set up to house the dead. Some of the bodies were carried so far down the river by the force of the floods that they were recovered in neighbouring India.

At least 900 of those still missing were working on the vast hydropower projects along the Trishuli River corridor, high up in the Himalayas, which were decimated by the floods and mudslides, The Guardian reported. Many of the workers were low-paid labourers, including at least 63 from outside Nepal. On Friday, dramatic footage showed Nepali soldiers pulling several survivors out through a thick wall of mud from a tunnel in the Trishuli-1 hydropower project. The Nepali army said they believed at least another 100 people were still trapped inside the tunnels, as well as dozens more trapped underground in the Trishuli-3 hydropower project.

Waiting at Kathmandu Hospital

At Tribhuvan University teaching hospital in Nepal's capital, Kathmandu, desperate relatives gathered in the hope of news. Four days on since the disaster struck, people continued to crowd round the police desk to register the names of missing family members. Hundreds of the injured are recovering in the hospital's wards, and people were frantically checking lists of patients, desperate to find a sign that their loved ones were still alive.

Posters of missing people line the wall of the hospital, the glue still fresh beneath. A schoolgirl smiling in her uniform; a beaming, chubby-cheeked baby; a couple smiling on their wedding day; a young man, hands on hips, atop a mountain peak; a young girl with flowing hair, peeking out from behind a door. These faces are just a fraction of the thousands who have not been seen since the floods.

Yavraj Lama said his sister, her husband, and their two children were missing after their village of Jaydada, in Rusawa district, had been entirely washed away. His eyes filled with tears as he glued a photo of one-year-old Sijan Tawang, a baby in the arms of his mother, to the hospital wall. A picture of 12-year-old Sahil, his brother, hung next to it. "We are numb, we don't have words to say how sad and distraught we are," said Lama. "Our main focus is trying to find baby Sijan."

Monita Nepali, 22, whose husband is missing, is comforted at the hospital in Kathmandu. She had spoken to her husband an hour before the floods hit when he was out for a morning walk in Rusawa. He had promised to call her that evening, but his phone has been ever off. "I don't want to live on the face of this earth without him," she said. Four days may have passed, Nepali said, but she had not stopped believing in her husband's return.

Tulmaya Tamang, 36, came to the hospital bearing posters of some of her 12 family members, including her five-month-old niece, who lived in a village in Rusawa and have not been seen since. "Our family is under tremendous stress," she said. As hopes for their survival faded, Tamang said they were now just hoping the bodies could be retrieved. "If we had the bodies, then at least we could have peace," she said.

Among those missing was 24-year-old Sujan Nepali, who had just finished his night shift at the hydropower project and was asleep in bed when the wall of water came gushing down the valley. At the hospital trauma centre in Nepal, his sister, Sushisha Maluwar, had returned anxiously every day to check if his name was on the list. "We haven't lost hope," she said. "We are writing down his name at the hospitals and putting up his photographs everywhere, hoping that we might find him somewhere."