For Del. team in Nepal, time to assess needs, logistics
KATHMANDU, Nepal — Thamel is the tourist center of Kathmandu, crammed with storefronts hawking healing herbs, straw bongos and North Face knockoffs.
But the streets were missing their vibrancy and intensity Monday morning, as the steady bang of hammers signaled a city slowly mending itself.
Locals wearing face masks milled about the winding streets, where every third storefront was closed. Brightly colored rickshaws were parked by roadsides near shrines where pigeons came to roost. A maze of steel and wooden beams propped up collapsing walls as street dogs curled up on scrap sheet metal.
Turning one corner found a trio of young men trying to retrieve an office desk from a mound of trash-strewn bricks that reeked of mildew. Wearing flip flops, they balanced on a thick rod of bamboo.
Seven members of the Delaware Medical Relief Team, a group of doctors, nurses, physician's assistants and logistics experts, arrived in Kathmandu on Sunday to start a week of delivering supplies and medical treatment to hard-hit villages around the capital city. They spent the last two hours of the flight circling the airport along with 10 other planes waiting to land.
The team spent Monday sorting through 1,000 pounds of supplies and meeting with doctors at a community hospital in Kathmandu that welcomed the extra sets of hands.
A smaller group of three were scheduled to leave Monday afternoon to drive eight hours north to the village of Syabrubesi, where they planned to establish a makeshift clinic and get the word out to neighboring villages that were leveled by the magnitude-7.8 earthquake. More than 7,900 people have died and more than 17,000 were injured in the April 25 earthquake.
Patrick Phelan, a physician's assistant in Christiana, Del., had a fitful night's sleep Sunday night, worried about trekking to remote villages that epitomized the unknown.
"Haiti was a new experience. It was a group effort," Phelan said, remembering the team's mission trip after the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
"This is a different case. We're going out on roads that are terrible with landslides."
Before leaving, he pocketed a box of Xanax, made in Nepal but shipped from the U.S. Where he was going, the residents have been on edge for two weeks straight, anticipating the next aftershock that could further cut them off from relief efforts trickling in.
At the hotel where the team is based, Mt. Annapurna Guest House, all six employees lost their homes to the quake and were camping out in empty rooms.
Owner Gitam Tuladhar pulled up an image on his phone of what appeared to be a bombed-out structure reduced to bricks and wooden beams.
"This is where my aunt is," he said, pointing to a black hole under the rubble.
The next image showed his family burning Tuladhar's aunt and her 13-year-old granddaughter in a religious ritual.