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After 33 Years Away, a Sudden Shaking in Nepal

I had never been in a hotel room that rolled and shook and seemed to spin in a circle.

But that’s what my fourth floor room at the Hotel Yak and Yeti in Kathmandu was doing just before noon on the last Saturday in April.  

I stood helplessly on the hardwood floor. In past years, I had felt small vibrations in minor earthquakes around the world. But this loud and heavy rolling, the pitching, the sense of being on a sea-borne carousel – this was new. As was the length: on and on it went, 80 seconds that felt endless.

I stared out the window. Waiting for something to end, either the shaking or, well, yes, it occurred to me, the end of me and hundreds of others in a pile of bricks and concrete.  Would that blue and white sign, “Sizzling Bar Restaurant with Dance,” be the last words I’d ever read?

Finally the shaking stopped. I took a few seconds to grab my passport and money and headed down the staircase. Hundreds of us poured out into the hotel’s front courtyard or into the rear lawn area – the lawn where we’d sleep at night the next two nights because it was unsafe to go back into the hotel after the magnitude 7.8 earthquake that has killed thousands in this Himalayan land.

I had come to Nepal two days earlier, just ahead of the arrival of the 11 journalists we had selected for a 12-day reporting fellowship on health and development – the latest trip organized by the International Reporting Project (IRP), a program I founded in 1998 as one of the first non-profit journalism programs to encourage more in-depth international reporting.

This was the 26^th group trip IRP had organized since 2000. For many journalists, these trips – shorter than the individual reporting fellowships we also award to journalists – are a more practical way to go overseas and do some reporting at a time when most news organizations had eliminated or cut budgets for foreign travel.

Why Nepal? We chose it because it is desperately poor and undeveloped. A nation of 28 million, it ranks low on many of the world’s standards of development, including access to health care, gender equality, access to electricity, sanitation and clean water. A beautiful land of snow-capped Himalayan peaks, Nepal is also a polluted and environmentally damaged nation with a woefully undeveloped infrastructure of roads and housing. Much of this is due to a government that, 10 years after the end of a decade-long Maoist rebellion, gets extremely low marks for efficiency and high marks for corruption and incompetence.

It was a country I’d reported from in the early 1980s when I was based in New Delhi for the Baltimore Sun. I remember from my half-dozen reporting trips here the beauty of the mountains and people and the splendor of the religious temples with their mix of Hindu and Buddhist traditions. I hadn’t been back to Nepal since 1982, when I traveled to Pokhara to do a story on the Gurkhas, the legendary mercenaries who were fighting in the British Army in its war against Argentina over the Falklands.

My two IRP colleagues, Glendora Meikle and Melody Schreiber, joined me in arriving a few days before the scheduled Sunday start of our program. Most of our 11 Fellows were coming in Saturday, but two of them, an Australian TV journalist and a New York-based British journalist, had come in early. The five of us were relaxed, confident that Glendora had prepared a great program for the journalists. On Friday night we had leisurely dinner at one of Kathmandu’s many enjoyable restaurants.

Soon after the quake hit on Saturday, it became clear that the devastation was on an enormous scale. Within hours, the number of reported dead surpassed 1,000 and continues to climb into the thousands. That night, residents of Kathmandu were too frightened to return inside their homes and we, like them, slept outside. The airport was closed and the rest of our journalists sent us emails or messages on Twitter that their flights were cancelled.

On Sunday, Melody and I drove through the city to see some of the damage. Much of the city was shuttered, both because it was Sunday and because of the fear of opening for any kind of business. We also stopped off at the U.S. embassy to find out what plans they had for emergency relief operations. While we were inside the embassy, an aftershock measured at magnitude 6.7 hit the city. The embassy shook for about 30 seconds. It felt like being in a shoebox shaken by an unseen giant.

The airport re-opened Sunday and journalists and relief workers arrived, while thousands of visitors jammed the airport trying to leave. At the Yak and Yeti, general manager Philippe Belhay told the guests it was still unsafe to spend the night in our rooms, so we huddled for a second night of sleeping outside, just like much of Kathmandu’s population.

It was an interesting and, as a thunderstorm broke over the city, an increasingly soggy mix of guests huddling on the Yak and Yeti lawn under blankets provided by the hotel. Next to us was a remnant of the hundreds of tattoo artists who had been attending the “5^th International Tattoo Conference.” A Buddhist nun celebrity, well known for her philanthropic work in Nepal, slept under a bush. An American climbing group, hoping to go to Everest before they learned that the quake had caused a fatal avalanche at the base camp, snuggled warmly in pricey sleeping bags they had brought for their trek.

And by Sunday night, journalists from around the world had streamed in, lugging their arsenals of satellite phones, cameras, boom mikes and sound boxes, commandeering the hotel lounges, lobby and, of course, the bar. Meanwhile, our group of IRP journalists too launched themselves into full reporting mode.

As we helped the journalists get connected with local fixers, translators and some of the experts on Nepal whom we had lined up for our 12-day program, we promised ourselves that one day we’d come back to do what we had intended to do – probe some of the underlying causes of stalled development and report on some of the work that is being done to achieve progress.

Nepal’s future is not all bleak. An impressive younger generation is using new technology in innovative ways to increase efficiency in food production, banking and education. The country has rich resources of fresh water and vast potential in hydroelectric power. But for now, any steps forward in Nepal will be slowed by the need to get life back to at least what it was before noon on that Saturday in April.

John Schidlovsky is director of the International Reporting Project (IRP)

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