Up to Babare, Dolakha Nepal consisted of an 11 hours bus ride through various small towns into the mountains that required many stops and back ups to accomplish getting around bends on the very narrow gravel road. We were up at 5:30 am to catch the 6:30 bus.

This taxi was the slowest I had every been on! He kept cleaning the windows that left a residue of oil smeared on them and his head lights too low to see. My patience was wearing thin but we made it in time and met up with our other team members.

Nick Abraham from Australia brought two other members from “From the bottom Up” a building team and Rajan, I, Sandip and Simon were from ChangeforHope. The seven of us huddled in the cold bus and finally got to Babare when the sun had set and it was pitch black. Out came the flashlights and up we went through rice fields for about 30 min. Tired is not the word I could use to express how I felt but we made it and the young people cheered me on! Great team work and God was obviously wanting me there again!

We met James and his family to large smiles and luminous eyes of his children running in cold cold weather with flip flops on and were shown to our living quarters that we would have the next two nights which consisted of corrugated metal over a wood frame. Our down jackets kept us warm enough and my stocking cap was pulled tightly over my ears fro two days. There were two girls in our team and so we got the pallets that were on the floor while the men slept on mats in the almost freezing temperature dip. We rolled out our sleeping bags and covers and prepared ourselves for the night. Behind the second small corrugated metal quanset hut was a small area in which food was to be cooked on an open fire. We all had eggs that night and crawled into our bags.

I became the hero when I gave everyone a heat pack for the night…lol…none froze.

The next morning we ate eggs again and headed off for the walk through the mountains to do the evaluation on the school.

Every house in the area was gone from when I was there last December..all rubble. It is unbelievable the resilience of the Nepali village people are. Gardens are growing again. A list was made of what could be done immediately ( tables, desks, chairs, rugs for the preschoolers floor and some colorful charts for the walls, white boards for all the teachers and plastic chairs). We will fix the fallen fence that we put up last year with one corner being replaced, we will build a retaining wall for a property boundary behind the fallen building and do other smaller things. Estimates are being made now. Nick evaluated the property for rebuilding all the buildings.

All walls fell and one building was completely lost. He will be using as much of the fallen materials as possible and we will combine efforts to get this done. Many large non profits came in initially when all homes were lost, but everything is temporary and will not last more than a year as plastic roofing is already falling apart.

We drove back to Kathmandu quite silent from what we saw. Breaks never cease squealing as the bus careens to the left and the right forcing us to rock back and forth. Roads built for one car amazingly allow for two busses to squeeze by each other. I close my eyes as it is not easy to look down and see the river a 1000 feet below.The bus seats are cramped and the driver stops often to pick up others on the road. School children climb aboard, people with goats and chickens climb onto the roof and now the bus contains more than double the capacity it should have. If I were claustrophobic I would have died! We stop three times in 11 hrs for breaks, noodles, dahl bhat or cookies. I look out at one such stop and find a young man on the roof of the bus with an open laptop clicking away with goats on either side of him. ONLY IN NEPAL!!!

Village after village with most at least 95% of the homes lost. Landslides everywhere. We heard that across the valley from Babare a bus was bringing supplies after the first eathquake and was taken by a landslide during the second quake. No one could reach the bus and over 30 people lost their lives.. My team had also gone up and had just finished delivering the food for 1500 people in Babare in April and they too ran from falling rocks and buildings. Happy they are to work for these effected people.

Blessed am I.

Next we we go to a village deep in the woods to deliver blankets and food to an entire village age people are freezing to death. The people group are the lowest in Nepal the Chepang people. They are marginalized by being landless. Pray for our safe journey and distribution of these needed items. The village consists of 90 families. We hope to give each home two blankets and a full 60# bag of rice.

I am working on a laptop with windows 10 and can’t figure out why this is wrapping the words the way it is….sorry for that…

In His Name

Pam