Nepal survivors return to ruins 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. 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.Lamichhane said 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 told AFP. “All my memories are there too.”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 floods. Forced to flee for their lives without time to take anything with them, many survivors are now returning to salvage whatever might remain — or simply to see what became of what they once called home.Hari Prasad Rimal returned to his home in the village of Devighat, hoping to recover treasured belongings. He brought back a photograph of his daughter. “It was pasted on a chest that was floating,” said Rimal, 44. “There was nothing else I could retrieve...” Rimal’s warehouse busine­ss, a few kilometres upstream, remained inaccessible, he said. Drone images showed only mud and debris where it had stood.In Dhunge, Navraj Upretti waded through knee-high sludge towards his home, flanked by two rescuers. “I have some imp­o­­rtant documents I really need,” he implored. Upretti, 40, said he had less than a minute to escape when the floods st­ru­ck. “The house was inundated; I managed to get barely 100 metres away,” said Upretti, who ran a restaurant in the area. All has been completely destroyed.