‘All of the sudden, I saw light': Nepal earthquake survivor recounts rescue
The 15-year-old boy had been buried alive for five days, listening to bulldozers clearing mountains of debris, fearful that the incessant aftershocks might collapse the darkened crevice he was trapped in.
And then, “all of the sudden I saw light,” Pemba Tamang said, recounting the moment on Thursday he was pulled from a hole at the bottom of what was once a seven-story building in Kathmandu.
Tamang did not know whether he was alive or dead. “I thought I was hallucinating,” he said.The improbable rescue was an uplifting moment in Nepal, which has been overwhelmed by death and destruction since the 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit on Saturday. On Friday, the government said the toll from the tremor, the most powerful recorded here since 1934, had risen to 6,198 dead.
After night fell, police reported another dramatic rescue: A woman in her 20s, Krishna Devi Khadka, was pulled from a building in the same neighborhood as Tamang near Kathmandu’s main bus terminal, according to an officer who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to talk to the media.
“Life has become a struggle to survive. It gives us hope,” Hans Raj Joshi said after watching Tamang’s rescue. “We thought they were only bringing out the dead. It’s hard to believe people are still alive.”
Lines of police stood on both sides, keeping back mobs of bystanders and journalists. A dazed Tamang, wearing a dark shirt with the New York Yankees logo and the words “New York Authentic,” blinked at the bright sky.
When the procession turned a corner and entered the main road outside, there came a sound Kathmandu hadn’t heard in days: the jubilant cheers of thousands of ecstatic onlookers.
Nepal, however, is far from normal. More than 70 aftershocks have been recorded in the Himalayan region by Indian scientists in the past five days, according to J.L. Gautam, the director of seismology at the Indian Meteorological Department in New Delhi.
Anxiety over the aftershocks and worries over the fate of relatives have caused many to leave the capital. Thousands have boarded buses provided by the government to their rural hometowns.
“I have to get home. It has already been so many days,” said Shanti Kumari, with her 7-year-old daughter, who was desperate to see family in her home village in eastern Nepal.
Although small shops have begun reopening, and the once ubiquitous tent cities have begun thinning out, an air of desperation remains. “We’re still feeling aftershocks. It still doesn’t feel safe,” said Prabhu Dutta, a 27-year-old banker from Kathmandu.
Some residents have begun returning to work, including at Dutta’s bank, but he said it was impossible to concentrate. “We roam around the office. We only have one topic of conversation: the earthquake.”
Tamang recounted his story to a group of reporters inside a tent at an Israeli field hospital. He looked weak and tired. His dark hair was disheveled. But otherwise he seemed fine.
When Saturday’s quake began at 11:56 a.m., Tamang said he was having lunch with a friend in the hotel where he worked. As he ran down toward the way out, the stairs shook. He saw walls cracking, ceilings caving in.
He was in the basement when “suddenly the building fell down. I thought I was about to die,” he said. Tamang fainted, and when he regained consciousness, he could see little but darkness.
He was buried face down in a tiny crevice deep in the rubble, and terrified. He could barely move.
Tamang survived on cans of ghee, or clarified butter. He rested his head on chunks of concrete and broken piece of corrugated aluminum roof.
Finally, on Thursday, one Nepalese team began combing the rubble in Tamang’s neighborhood, a place they had found another survivor on Monday. They cried out and knocked on broken concrete slabs, and then listened closely for any response.
Mostly there was silence. But when an officer named L. Bahadu Basnet, shouted “Is anyone there?” he was shocked to get a reply.
“Who is there? Brother, I am here!” Tamang shouted back weakly.
The team used a car jack to help ensure a slab above the rectangular entrance did not cave in. Basnet took off his helmet, put on a headlamp, and crawled on his arms 10 feet (3 meters) inside, pushed in by his colleagues.
He could see Tamang wedged lying down in a crevice behind a motorcycle, and was shocked how responsive he was. “He thanked me when I first approached him,” Basnet said. “He told me his name, his address, and I gave him some water. I assured him we were near.”
It took a few hours to delicately clear the way for Tamang to be lifted out. Members of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Disaster Assistance Response Team brought in equipment to help and lowered a pole-mounted rotatable camera into the hole, said one of the team’s members, Andrew Olvera.
Police said Tamang asked for one thing while he waited: juice.
Looking at a pair of huge, ripped concrete floors hanging precariously like curtains on the side of the destroyed building, just above the cratered rescue site, Olvera said the operation was dangerous. But, “it’s risk versus gain. To save a human life, we’ll risk almost anything.”
At the Israeli field hospital, doctors X-rayed Tamang and injected him with glucose. Lt. Libby Weiss of the Israeli Defense Forces said he was dehydrated but lucid and “in remarkably good shape,” with no other injuries except scratches.
“It’s a miracle,” Weiss said. “I think it’s an amazing thing to see in the midst of all this calamity.”
Naryan Pandey was one of the spectators standing on the main street outside when Tamang was carried out.
“I’m surprised he’s still alive. We’ve seen dead bodies coming out of the rubble for five days,” Pandey said. “But it doesn’t change what we are going through. I’ve barely eaten. We don’t have enough water. I’m hungry.”
And then he added, eyeing the rubble beyond: “My friend is still in there. He was a cook. He’s still there.”
Why a 31-year-old Yale grad gave up a $95,000 salary to move to
the Caribbean and scoop ice cream
Noelle Hancock actually did it.
On Cosmopolitan.com, Hancock explains why she walked away from her $95,000 salary as a journalist in New York City, her East Village apartment, and most of her belongings to move to St. John, the smallest of the US Virgin Islands.
Four years ago, inspired by a tropical screensaver and hungry for a vacation, she broke her lease, sold her possessions, and bought a one-way ticket to the USVI, where she took a job scooping ice cream.
Hancock was 31 years old, a graduate of Yale University, and came from a conservative Southern family that was aghast at her decision.
She writes:
Perhaps there was something indulgent and Peter Pan-ish about this new lifestyle. But the truth is, I was happier scooping mint chocolate chip for $10 an hour than I was making almost six figures at my previous corporate job. It was calming to work with my hands. I met new people constantly, talking face-to-face instead of communicating via email and instant messaging. When I closed the shop at the end of the shift, my work was done and my time my own.
Besides, I found that not everyone shared my parents' concern. "When I moved here 25 years ago, my dad insisted I was ruining my life," said one of my regular customers when we got to chatting about our lives one day. "Recently he visited and told me, 'You had it right all along. I'm toward the end of my life and looking to retire to someplace like this, and now I'm too old to enjoy it.'"
Hancock muses that pursuing a nontraditional path has opened her up to a whole world of opportunities and lifestyles — none of which provide the familiar financial stability and predictable career path of her life in New York.
She added:
These days, I work as a bartender, a job I pursued simply because it's something I always wanted to try. Sometimes I think back to the question I used to be asked in job interviews: "Where do you see yourself in five years?" That always seemed a depressing notion, to already know what you'd be doing five years in the future.
Here it's not unusual for someone to work as a cook on St. John, then move to Thailand for six months to work as a dive instructor, then they will head off to Alaska and work on a fishing boat. Living abroad has exposed me to a different approach to life, one in which you're not expected to settle in one place and do one kind of job. Perhaps some of us are meant to move around every few years, change jobs and live many different micro lives.
Hancock isn't the only one who's been inspired to create the lifestyle she dreams of. Jonathan Banksspent four years sailing the world instead of showing up for his MBA; Danika and Chris Garlotta have turned to freelance jobs to support them as they tour the globe; Scott Leonard moved his wife and three sons onto a 50-foot catamaran to manage his company from distant shores; Jonathan Looksold everything he owned to spend his retirement abroad.
If you ask people like them, there's more outside that office window than traffic.
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