Approaching the village of Sipa Ghat in Nepal two days after the devastating earthquake in 2015.
‘Waiting for That Cut’
Essay | Jesse Pesta
Dhanbahadur Shresta is a country doctor in a remote village in Nepal. He had just pulled someone’s tooth and was reassuring his patient that the pain wouldn’t last too long when the earthquake struck.
His stone building collapsed, burying patient and doctor alive. Pinned beneath rubble, Mr. Shresta said, he decided: “Death was certain.”
The two remained trapped for an hour, he told me, before he finally caught the attention of rescuers by whistling loudly to indicate he was there beneath the stones and timber. He and I spoke two days after the 2015 earthquake that devastated Nepal. I was there to write about the disaster.
Dhanbahadur Shresta pointing to the room where he’d recently been buried.
His village, Sipa Ghat, is quite literally at the end of the road. It’s a tiny market town, surrounded by paddy, on the banks of the Indravati River several hours’ drive outside Kathmandu. If you want to cross the Indravati and travel further, you must walk across a cable footbridge. Like I said, end of the road.
I found myself there because I had wanted to quickly travel as far as possible into the countryside to get a sense of the scope of the destruction and to understand how people were faring with a crisis beyond comprehension.
Sipa Ghat is, or was, a village of 200 or so homes and shophouses selling groceries, fertilizer and other rural staples. Almost every building had collapsed. As I arrived, residents feared there were still dead to be discovered, though they couldn’t be sure. After all, it’s a market town, one man pointed out — who knows what unlucky souls might have walked in from the countryside to do some shopping?
I found Mr. Shresta sitting beside his ruined shop, near the cable bridge. He described the horror of being buried alive. “It’s like when you’re ready to slaughter a goat, but you haven’t chopped it yet,” he said, making a cutting motion across his neck. “It’s like waiting for that cut.”