Voices: Post-quake Nepal a country rattled to the core

KATHMANDU – Life now is divided into "before" and "after." Days and dates have been filtered out, replaced by the overwhelming needs of people around me and a constant gnawing sense of loss and anxiety. I have lived in Kathmandu for almost two years and, more than any other place, this is now my home.

The magnitude-7.8 earthquake of April 25 has only reinforced that feeling. My days now are spent juggling two worlds that constantly overlap: that of a mother with the responsibility for a 10-year-old son, a home and six extended Nepali families that in one way or another have worked for us, and also that of being a reporter.

Like everyone else, I have anxieties and am on edge waiting for the next aftershock and have a constant "earthquake hangover" – the feeling of being frequently dizzy and off-balance. I comb my area stores to stock up on food and water and plastic tarps for dozens of people. The daily downpours have made life miserable, wet and cold for hundreds of thousands of Nepalis whose homes were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable.

It is the first line of our greetings now: "Is your house OK?" The answers are numbingly repetitive. Some of the Nepalis I know have lost everything except for whatever they have managed to salvage by digging through rubble or running in and out of teetering houses. My friend Keshav Tapa Magar lives in the village of Koth Gaun perched on one of the highest southern hills encircling the Kathmandu Valley. On a clear, sunny day, you can see a dozen of Nepal's highest snow-clad peaks to the north and the sprawling smog-cloaked capital city. When I visited it a few months ago, I had the feeling of soaring above the world, like an eagle geared up with a camera.

The village consists of 75 traditional houses made of hard-packed tawny red mud and bricks and matching tiled roofs. We sat on the neatly swept ground in front of his house eating roasted boar, rice and his avocados. During lunch, Keshav managed to sneak many an avocado chunk to my huge and delighted Rhodesian Ridgeback. Today Koth Gaun, like many other villages, is no more. Not one house is left standing.

It is not just the ancient temples and stupas that have crumbled, but a whole way of life. Nepal's allure to the outside world has been its monuments, its mountains and its people. All have been terribly battered. At every pile of rubble I pass, I remember what it looked like before and then I pause knowing I will never see it again.

Before the quake, I'd joke with my husband that it was impossible to get an editor to show a glimmer of interest in a Nepal story unless it involved Everest (the main exception is my editor at NPR's Goats and Soda blog). Within hours of the quake, I was being bombarded with interview requests from as far as Australia and Colombia and job offers from NGOs on their way in.

The "Big One," as some have called it here, has brought massive international aid and hordes of international journalists. Yet much of the story is outside of the valley, in areas blocked by landslides, far from cell connections and extremely difficult to access. That story remains to be told.

The government seems to be at a loss about how and where to coordinate, and so far less than 10% of the aid that has come into the country has made it out of the Kathmandu Valley. The huge and heavy aid planes keep on coming, on Wednesday cracking Kathmandu's single runway so badly that the airport had to be closed for repairs.

The city seems to be descending into another type of chaos: that of disorganization and lack of guidance.

Early Thursday morning, under a gray drizzly sky, I walked through Kathmandu's centuries-old Darbar Square. Most of the multi-tiered brick and carved-wood temples are rubble. The main square is now home to red and blue tarpaulins, their huddled inhabitants making tea and chatting.

Less than 15 feet away is the white Rana palace, partially fallen down, its two-story walls marked by deep jagged cracks and precariously leaning toward the central square. Then marching up the muddy road is an orange-uniformed Japanese search-and-rescue team, at least 18 members strong and complete with helmets and search lights, stopped in front of a group of Nepali policemen busy digging through the rubble of a temple by hand. They exchanged a few words with the police, but there seemed to be no urgency in their work.

We are in Day 6, and finding survivors under the rubble is against the odds, so I wondered what they were doing here. "We are here to do search-and-rescue," one team member told me. "We found one body yesterday." Under the heavy, overcast sky, their fluorescent high-tech uniforms stood out, emblematic of how incongruous the efforts of good Samaritans can be.

Yet less than 13 kilometers away in the town of Bungamati, more than 60% or the houses had been destroyed and not a single international aid agency had shown up. A total disconnect between needs and aid delivery.

Lorch, a former New York Times correspondent, is a freelance writer based in Kathmandu.