The village of Dandagaun is hard to reach on a good day. The access road starts at the Bhote Koshi River, a Class V waterway that drains Himalayan glaciers, then heads more or less straight up for 5,000 feet, past tiny villages and mountain streams. After 10 long miles it curves into a bowl that opens to the northeast. Here sit terraced fields of rice and corn cut into the hillside. Technically speaking, the village, in Nepal's Sindhupalchowk district, lies in the Himalayan foothills. But these are foothills in the way that the sun is a medium-size star. The ridgeline above the village rises sharply for a quarter mile. Looking at it requires straining your neck directly up.
In the morning, when light first cuts through the gorge and fills the bowl, Dandagaun is the kind of place that could change an agnostic's mind. To the south you can see the Bhote Koshi cutting its way through the deep gorge. To the northeast the Himalayas shine like so many white knives. Tibet is 20 miles away. For the mix of 1,400 or so Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians who live here, the presence of the divine is a tactile fact, visible each and every day. Of course there are gods. They live in the peaks just upriver.
Many observers of the April 25, 7.8-magnitude earthquake have noted the devastation's sporadic nature: One Kathmandu neighborhood is fine, the next a scene from The Road. But there was nothing random about what happened at Dandagaun that Saturday. Open bowls beneath knife-edge ridges are bad places to be during earthquakes. First the mountain shook, destroying most of the village's 180-odd stone and mud buildings. Then the ridgeline above simply fell apart, setting off the equivalent of a geologic mortar attack. A series of rockslides came off the mountainside, careering for about a quarter mile and gathering speed. Massive boulders ripped through town, crushing several houses. An elderly man out cutting grass was beheaded. When the geology had finished rearranging itself, 34 people perished and only a few buildings were left standing. The survivors burned the dead.
A couple of days later, when the hillsides were still shivering with aftershocks, Dipak Deuja, a charismatic, handsome 24-year-old from Dandagaun, started the long walk home. He'd been in Kathmandu at the time of the quake, and when he finally arrived at the village he found his immediate family and his bride of six weeks, Shunita, spared.
But 10 relatives, including an uncle, some nephews, and his brother's wife, had been killed. Soon his cousin Sandesh Deuja, a 23-year-old truck driver with a somber glare and a crisp fauxhawk, arrived. He too had been working out of town at the time of the quake, and he too found his family spared but his house wrecked. Both men helped build temporary shelters from wood and corrugated metal for their families not more than 50 feet from the sites of their destroyed homes. Then they tended to the urgent matter of finding food. In rural Nepal, villagers cache harvested crops in their homes. Those were now a rubble. Sandesh and Dipak, like everyone else, dug out what rice and corn they could find and stored it in the school, which at least still had a roof. No walls, though—those had fallen in.
One week later, someone showed up: a raft guide named Megh Ale, who operates an eco-resort on the Bhote Koshi. He arrived with some medical supplies, volunteers, and not enough food. Upon seeing the extent of the devastation, he approached the Deujas. Ale told the cousins to head to Kathmandu and find a bed-and-breakfast called the Yellow House. Over the past two weeks, as the government and large international NGOs have struggled to deliver supplies in Nepal's remote regions, the Yellow House has emerged as the hub of a vibrant guerrilla aid operation run by a handful of young people armed with little more than Facebook, open source mapping technology, local knowledge, and some antiestablishment verve.
Unregistered, unlicensed, and nonexistent in official terms, the Yellow House group is one of many ad hoc efforts that have cropped up to deliver aid to some of the quake's hardest-hit areas quickly and without much fuss. Recently, the milieu at the Yellow House has expanded from urbane young Nepalis and wide-eyed international travelers to include prominent NGOs such as Team Rubicon, a group of US military vets sponsored by the Home Depot. Even the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has started delivering supplies through the group. But Sandesh and Dipak didn't know any of that, nor would they have particularly cared. They just needed some rice and tarps, given the forthcoming monsoons. So they recruited two of the town's other young, strong men. Then they started walking down the mountain.
Everyone knew this earthquake—the first one at least—was coming. Many, though, are surprised that it didn't exact a steeper toll. Before Tuesday's 7.3-magnitude aftershock, the death count was around 8,000—a fraction of what many experts had predicted for such a massive event so near Kathmandu. That the quake happened during the day and not in winter or the monsoon season seems a small mercy. It also occurred on Saturday, a holy day when schools are closed. "I expected a much higher death toll and much higher destruction," says Bill Berger, the USAID's Disaster Assistance Response Team leader. Berger, who has lived in Nepal for 18 years and anticipated this quake for about that long, notes that many relief teams were actually well prepared, digging water wells in open spaces in Kathmandu in advance of the disaster and building a storage unit at the airport to avoid backlogs on the tarmac.
Still, you wouldn't know that from reading the local and international press. In the two weeks since the earthquake, papers have been filled with invective over the government's sluggishness in delivering aid. International search and rescue teams immediately swarmed the city but managed to save only a handful of people before being called off. After that they could frequently be seen in Thamel, Kathmandu's storied hippie haven, drinking beer or shopping for cashmere in full technical gear. The government launched a Prime Minister's Relief Fund, which all new NGOs had to funnel their money through. Aid groups started to deliver reams of goods, but most of them stuck to areas close to Kathmandu for the first week or so. "The government requires lots of paperwork and rules, even in times of disaster," one official with a majore international aid group told me. "We wished we could help more people quickly, but it's up to the government."
There were a few absurd episodes too that didn't help. A US Air Force Osprey aircraft carrying relief supplies blew the roof off a building while landing in Charikot. In Sindhupalchowk, some aid groups distributed reusable cloth sanitary pads. Not knowing what they were, villagers reportedly turned them into the sorts of face masks that are ubiquitous in the Kathmandu valley due to smog. Many locals griped about the government; others merely shrugged. "The narrative of 'Oh, the government's corrupt, nothing works, everything is slow'—that is news to exactly no one who lives here," says Ben Ayers, Nepal Country Director of the nonprofit dZi Foundation. A lapsed climber with a hard-boiled kind of optimism, the 38-year-old American has lived in Nepal for the past 16 years, first working to improve labor conditions for porters and more recently to build schools in rural Nepal. "The only way to game the system in Nepal," he told me, "is to work outside the system."
With this in mind, Ayers and a crew of friends gathered at the Yellow House, a small inn in the Sanepa neighborhood, two days after the earthquake. Among them were a photographer, Nayantara Gurung Kakshapati, 33, whose family owns the bed-and-breakfast; Soham Dhakal, a 40-year-old filmmaker; and Niranjan Kunwar, a 33-year-old teacher and writer who anonymously pens a gay lifestyle column. Gurung Kakshapati wanted to give out bread. Dhakal was obsessed with water filters. "We had really no idea what we were doing," Ayers says. "We settled on a list of priorities, and then the next day they changed completely. It was anarchy."
Gurung Kakshapati quickly emerged as the leader of the group—her family operates both the bed-and-breakfast and a Kathmandu bread factory. After everyone bickered a little more, she packed up a truck with bread and first-aid kits and drove to six towns in the Lalitpur district of Kathmandu.
The next day, Dhakal heard about a local man named Nama Budhathoki who was running an open-source-mapping nonprofit called Kathmandu Living Labs. Budhathoki was in a PhD program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Anticipating such an event in Nepal, he then made it his mission to create an open source Kathmandu map using satellite imagery. Once the quake hit, he launched the site quakemaps.org, onto which he added layers allowing people to report earthquake data and response information in real time. Thousands of volunteer mappers in Europe and the US then worked to create precise maps of Nepal's rugged terrain, which is otherwise extraordinarily difficult to navigate without local knowledge. Dhakal arranged to meet with Budhathoki, and the Yellow House started using the site as a sort of clearinghouse to identify areas of need; it would also come to serve as a real-time database of missions, allowing the volunteers to see, say, whether a village had already received tarps.
The Yellow House recruited via word of mouth and started a Facebook page called Himalayan Disaster Relief Volunteer Group. Then people started showing up. A lot of people. There were doctors and students and travelers and photographers. Sumit Dayal, a Nepali photojournalist who lives in India, started a hashtag, #nepalphotoproject, to provide accurate information on which areas had received aid and which hadn't. Soon he had 60,000 Instagram followers and the project was featured on a Time blog. He used the attention to direct followers to the Yellow House and other similar pop-up aid groups that materialized in the days after the quake.
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By and large these efforts were scrappy, relying on local knowledge, Facebook or word-of mouth organizing, and cash donations.
But no one was as efficient or technologically savvy as Yellow House. The group's organizers asked friends in Belgium and the US to start crowdfunding campaigns. It became apparent that the most pressing needs were rice and tarps. While search and rescue teams were looking for the last survivors and big aid groups were still scrambling to ramp up their operations, the Yellow House sent some of the first supplies to western Sindhupalchowk and Gorkha, the epicenter of the April 25 quake. In Sindhupalchowk, volunteers including a British nurse who moonlights as a fairy-tale writer found three villagers in need of evacuations. One had been hemorrhaging for 12 days since suffering a miscarriage during the earthquake; another had a broken pelvis; a third, sepsis. Using Facebook, Gurung Kakshapati arranged a private helicopter medevac.
In the first two weeks after the disaster, the group dispatched 172 missions, all of which emerged from the field intact. Eventually big groups started to take note. A volunteer whose wife works for the United Nations connected the Yellow House with the UNHCR, which provided 1,200 tarps. Still, there were hitches—one day 250 people showed up at the bed-and-breakfast and Gurung Kakshapati had to shut the doors or risk being overwhelmed. Then three trucks broke down in Dhading. Later, Gurung Kakshapati's phone rang: It was a tax official. She gasped. Had they screwed something up with the crowdfunding? No—the guy needed some supplies for a village in Dhading, and he wanted to know if the Yellow House team would help. "In Nepal you always somehow end up being in the wrong place at the right time," says Ayers of the dZi Foundation. "There have been times in the past two weeks when we'd look at each other and say, 'This is our finest hour.'"
As of last weekend, the Yellow House was planning to scale down. The big NGOs were up and running, and they have resources that small efforts can't match. The Yellow House raised about $75,000 for the quake through its crowdfunding campaigns; USAID, on the other hand, has pledged $23.5 million to relief. Then there's the matter of safety. The more missions the groups send out, the higher the probability for an episode worse than a broken-down truck. Still, as USAID's Berger notes, "It's all hands on deck. There's no country in the world that would be getting everything to everybody that needed it, never mind one with this terrain. That's why it's important that neighbors are helping neighbors. International aid is not solving this. It's got to be the people of Nepal. We augment the government's capacity and help in every way we can to get as much out as quickly as possible, but aid doesn't get everywhere immediately—especially with villages at high altitude."
Over the course of two afternoons at the bed-and-breakfast last week, I saw members of Team Rubicon, the nonprofit run by former US military vets, gathered in the backyard, planning a mission while sitting near a large yellow wall covered in handwritten signs like FREE SURGICAL, MEDICAL TREATMENT and 50+ MOTORCYCLE RIDERS AVAILABLE. Nepali hipsters cut up huge swaths of plastic sheeting into tarps out front, near a fleet of motorcycles. A couple showed up who operate a trekking outfit out of the devastated Langtang region. They needed supplies for 600 families who helped run guesthouses, and the government had frozen their funds temporarily. Could the Yellow House help? An American woman walked into the backyard, looked around quizzically, and asked Niranjan Kunwar, the teacher and writer, "Who are you with?" Kunwar looked up from his laptop, on which he was organizing a mission, paused, and said, "No one, really."
The prerequisites for joining a Yellow House mission aren't too onerous. You just show up and fill out a form with your name, an emergency contact, and a list of whatever supplies you're carrying. You receive a brief volunteer training. Then off you go. On Thursday morning, I signed up for a trip to Sindhupalchowk. Joining me were an energetic Nepali Dartmouth student, a 27-year-old trekker from the States who canceled his return flight home so he could help, and a stoic, ready-for-anything Nepali trekking guide. At about 9 am we were given a quick briefing—bring a sleeping bag, good luck, and please come back was the gist of it—and then we met the rest of our team: the Deuja cousins—Sandesh and Dipak—and their two buddies from Dandagaun.
After a long trip down the mountain that crushed their village, they had taken a bus to Kathmandu. There Sandesh, who drives a truck transporting goods in and out of China, had picked up his boss's vehicle. A brightly painted Tata trailer with the words OFF ROAD EXPRESS on the front bumper, it had six massive tires and doors that stayed closed only sporadically. The Yellow House set the guys up with 525 kilograms of rice and 182 tarps—one per family in Dandagaun. Half of the tarps came from the UNHCR, and half of them came from an Indian aid relief group that was bringing supplies across the border. Once we loaded them up, Sandesh, who appeared to be in charge, said simply, "Go."
He took the wheel. The red, purple, and yellow tassels hanging from the roof of the cab fluttered as he navigated Kathmandu's streets, Dipak occasionally using sticks to lift power lines above the truck. We left the city and climbed. Sindhupalchowk is about 60 miles from Kathmandu; if you're driving quickly, you can make it in three or four hours. We were driving quickly. Dipak, sitting on the passenger's side, held his door shut with a tough embrace. The visible quake damage increased the farther we drove into the mountains. Soon fully intact buildings became anomalies. Sandesh cranked Indian pop music. At various points we were stopped by police and army officers. As aid has started reaching the mountains, reports have emerged of desperate villagers looting trucks. Now most aid trucks are required to have armed escorts. Each time the army waved over Sandesh, though, he explained he was a member of the Sindhupalchowk community and managed to talk his way out of being assigned to a convoy.
Then we arrived at the entrance of the Sindhupalchowk district. Underneath a big, curving arch were a throng of officers and a line of camouflaged vehicles. One bore a Swiss flag, another Chinese characters. An officer waved the truck over and informed Sandesh that no one could enter Sindhupalchowk unescorted on account of recent looting. To which Sandesh replied, essentially, "I'm just going home, man." The officer waved him through.
The towns along the road, which tracks the curve of the Bhote Koshi, were all decimated, and people walked the streets wearing blank expressions. Here was a man with a makeshift cast on his leg. There women sat under a broken roof, selling soda. A cow crouched under a small tarp.
The Chinese, Canadians, and Swiss drove Polaris four-wheel-drive vehicles around, looking busy. We came upon a Canadian army vehicle attempting a slow and awkward six-point turn beneath a recently cleared landslide. The driver was a thickset guy in wraparound sunglasses, a helmet, and full combat kit. As he backed up, Sandesh blared his horn and whipped the Off Road Express around the Polaris, wheels teetering on the sheer edge of the road. The Canadian wore an expression of disbelief. Sandesh cranked the music, looked into the back of the cab, and for one moment his permanent glower turned into a huge smile. I thought of Robin Hood merrily distributing goods through Sherwood Forest. But then, Robin Hood's neighbors weren't beheaded by falling rocks.
The tracks of landslides were visible everywhere. It started to rain. We picked up a couple of officers from the UNHCR on the side of the road, who wanted to survey Dandagaun and see their Yellow House tarps delivered. They appeared relieved to follow a local vehicle. Often Sandesh slowed the truck to shake the hands of friends. It took on the feeling of a clandestine victory lap. At one point we all hopped out, and villagers started approaching quickly, eying our supplies. Sandesh and Dipak pointed at the truck with urgent looks on their faces. We all got back in and he drove on until we reached the rafting resort run by Megh Ale, where we camped by the river.
At 5 the next morning, Dipak shook our tent: "It's late," he said. We unloaded the goods for his village into a smaller truck and all the Nepalis hopped on the bed, on top of a giant tarp covering the supplies. The two foreigners on the trip—Gula and myself—were told to ride in the smaller UN vehicle so as to attract the least attention to the supply truck. The 10-mile drive to Dandagaun took more than an hour. When we arrived just outside the village light was filtering through the trees and reflecting off the river far below, and a massive landslide blocked the road to Dandagaun. We stopped, and villagers materialized in a long line. As he passed out blankets, Sandesh told me that his family of 15 would receive one bag of rice for his efforts.
After a couple of hours the goods were delivered, and Dipak took me past the landslide to see his home, which sits on a small plateau facing southeast. The ridge above the plateau was striped with white slashes that looked to be about a quarter mile long and a hundred yards wide: more landslides. The one directly above his home hadn't come down all the way yet. The monsoons would arrive in a month, threatening to turn the loose rock and soil to mudslides. Cracks in the earth were visible everywhere. "What do we do?" Dipak asked. "It's not safe here."
He said he planned to move his family to another village. When that was done, maybe in a month, he hoped to go to India, to join a friend's multilevel-marketing business. He was done with his previous job driving trucks—he only made about 5,000 Nepalese rupees, or $50, a month doing that. The other business he'd tried, importing mobile phones, wasn't much better. He needed to provide for his wife, Shunita. But he didn't know what to do about the other 1,400 people living in the shadow of the loose ridge. "I want to save my village," he said. "But what do I do?" We walked to what was left of the school—a frame and roof. Here a group of young women sat near the village's last stores of corn. An older woman with a wizened face walked by and said, "I am alive, but I will die here."
We went to see Dipak's family. His father, mother, grandmother, and brother stood in a sturdy makeshift structure of wood and corrugated metal. Shunita, a beautiful woman in her twenties, sat at a small nearby shelter, cooking dal bhat. Dipak too had received one bag of rice for his family of 14, but he insisted on feeding all the volunteers. "Now we eat," he said, cracking a huge smile. "Eat!"
After lunch, he and Sandesh gathered the group and put their hands in a circle. They counted out: "One, two, three, Nepal!" throwing their hands in the air. A few minutes later the earth shuddered with a deep, resonant whump—an aftershock. The group paused and waited. No rocks came down. I left with the UN vehicle, and Sandesh and Dipak led the group up the mountain. They were headed to a village called Deurali. It was on the far side of the ridge, and no aid had arrived there yet.
Four days later, Nepal exploded yet again. On Tuesday at 12:35 pm, that magnitude 7.3 aftershock hit. In Kathmandu, Gurung Kakshapati, Ayers and the rest of the Yellow House crew were fine. Gurung Kakshapti told me that most people had gone to sleep outside and that her neighbors had started blowing whistles at every aftershock. But in Nepal, it’s always the people who can afford it least who seem to get hardest hit. The epicenter of the second quake was near the border of the Sindhupalchowk and Dolakha districts, 15 miles or so from Dandagaun. On Tuesday morning, a relief team from the Yellow House was on its way to deliver further supplies to Dipak and Sandesh. When the quake hit, they had to turn back. The Deuja boys were up on the mountain to fend for themselves.
