A Personal Account of the Earthquake in Nepal

For the past few years, I’ve taken my vacation in the spring – clear of winter weather and not yet peak travel season. This past April I planned to visit a friend in Nepal, who has a house in Kathmandu and has lived in the country for over 15 years. I had no idea that Nepal was an earthquake zone when I booked my trip; even a quick reading of the Rough Guide did not raise the concern. (After the fact, I found a boxed text buried in the back history section but no entry in the index.)

I flew into Kathmandu and spent a week visiting temples and sites, and on Friday, April 24, 2015, we took a 45-minute helicopter ride to Lukla, a mountain town to the northeast. My friend had worked there previously and wanted to take me to a puja (literally, an act of worship, in this case a ceremony with monks) that was taking place in a nearby village on Saturday. The purpose of the puja was to pray for the upcoming monsoon season for rain and a good crop. This ceremony consisted of seven monks, several chanting, several blowing horns, and one beating a drum for the majority of the morning. Each year, a different household hosts the ceremony and this year it was on the upper floor of a two-story stone masonry house. The monks sat along a long wall and the villagers sat around the other sides of the room. We were served a savory pancake and endless cups of milk tea; villagers made small talk and caught up with each other. After a couple of hours, my friend and I made a polite exit for a coffee break—the sweet tea had crashed our blood sugar levels—across the dirt path to our lodging, a house he had lived in while working in Lukla years ago.

As we sat in the kitchen reviving our senses, I wondered why it felt like a subway was running under the village. As the rumbling grew to shaking, I looked out the window at the passers-by and thought it felt like a truck was driving by—impossible in this village. I looked at my friend and he said off-handedly, it’s an earthquake. I read later that the region experiences numerous tremors a year at magnitude 4 or 5, but at the moment I could scarcely comprehend. Before I could ask a string of incredulous questions, he began shouting to get out of the house, to run immediately as the shaking worsened. That morning I had bemusedly put on a sherpa outfit for the puja, a long wrap dress with a striped apron, and in that moment, I hiked up the skirt and made a bee-line out the kitchen and front doors. By the time I was running down the dirt path, the ground rocked like an amusement park ride and I could barely run straight. We both were still holding our cups of coffee, and you realize that in an emergency, you run with whatever is in your hands. Away from buildings, we crouched near a low wall, and unbelievably before our eyes, walls and buildings fell. In front of us, the end wall of the house we slept in collapsed, the dry-laid stones dislodging and falling to the ground, exposing the room in which we were staying. Next to us, all four walls of a stone masonry toilet structure completely collapsed. In a matter of seconds, every house in the village was damaged, with exterior walls either seriously cracked, or partially or completely collapsed.

Afterwards, villagers remarked that it was earthquake weather, misty and cool and damp. It was also said that a monk became drunk by the end of the puja, and this was related to the earthquake. Later, a villager said the earthquake was retribution for dishonorable behavior, like overcharging tourists for services such as hot water or charging their phones. People had lost their dharma and this was the consequence.

In the days and weeks that followed, we checked in with friends and shared stories of where we were and what we were doing. It reminded me of the days after 9/11 when we asked with unusual emphasis: How are you? Where were you? Is everyone you know okay? The event was so wide-reaching that it was difficult to comprehend, except in personal stories. There was a friend stuck in an elevator, another in the shower, and one who was thrown off while riding his motorcycle. I myself lost my phone in the event, having left it on the window sill of the wall that collapsed.