Nepal Resilience System Working Group

Expert medical and non-medical expert teams are assisting victims of the Nepal Earthquake, which shook the Kathmandu Valley before noon on Saturday 25 April.

msf.org.uk

We currently have approximately 120 staff working in Nepal.

An MSF surgical team provided support for three days at the hospital in Bhaktapur, on the outskirts of Kathmandu, in order to help the staff operate on waiting patients.

In the town of Arughat, in Gorkha district, we are setting up a 20-bed inflatable hospital to initially provide treatment for wounded people.

We are adding mental health workers to our teams to begin providing psychological first aid in villages where people have suffered severe psychological trauma.

We have flown in more than 80 tonnes of supplies.

Update: 5 May 2015

Since 29 April, Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) medical teams in Nepal have started reaching people spread across isolated mountain villages by helicopter and on foot. The districts of Dhading, Gorkha, Rasuwa and Sindhupalchowk were hit hard on 25 April and little or no assistance has reached many villages.

Red Cross voluntaries hand out tarpaulins and put up tents in the village of Khalckok in Nepal. Palani Mohan/IFRC

ifrc.org - by Patrick Fuller
May 6, 2015

To the casual observer, the busy highway between Kathmandu and the town of Kavere, gives a misleading impression of the extent of the destruction caused by the 25 April earthquake. Life goes on as normal and homes and shops are untouched. It’s not until you turn off the road at the town of Sangha and travel three kilometres up a bumpy dirt track into the surrounding hills, that the true picture of this disaster unfolds.

A team of young Nepal Red Cross Society volunteers is delivering tents and tarpaulins to households in the remote village of Khalchok, perched high on a ridge traversing a series of hill-tops. 115 of the 135 homes in the community are either totally destroyed or uninhabitable. The higher you travel, the worse the damage becomes. When the track ends,  the volunteers disembark from the 4-wheeled drive vehicle and start to carry the first of the family tents on a half hour trek up a narrow path to what remains of the home of Subash Lama.

Drone footage shot by ABC cameraman Brant Cumming in the Gorkha district shows buildings reduced to rubble by the April 25 earthquake. This video highlights the remoteness of the affected areas in Nepal and the difficulties faced by rescue personnel struggling to reach them.

submitted by George Hurlburt

theconversation.com - by Gerard Fitzgerald, Apil Gurung, and Bharat Raj Poudel - May 5, 2015

The media in Nepal has been instrumental in keeping people connected and updated about the recent magnitude 7.8 earthquake that hit the country on Saturday April 25.

However, initially the quake did not create a major reaction, as small scale tremors are not uncommon in the country. The Nepalese people were also unclear about the extent of the disaster as local media struggled to react to the earthquake.

The reality of the scale of the disaster began to sink in when heartbreaking pictures of the damage started emerging. Live footage and pictures from the international media gave some insight into the extent of the devastation in the earthquake ravaged nation.

NEW YORK TIMES By GARDINER HARRIS               May 4, 2015