Nepal Earthquake Opened Up Fault Lines in Human Character, Too
An earthquake survivor walks past a destroyed house in Chautara, about 80km from Kathmandu. Philippe Lopez / AFP
I wear a red string around my wrist. I got the string from Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, at a monastery just up the hill from the Boudhanath Stupa, in Kathmandu. I am told the small knot in the red string represents the blessing Rinpoche bestowed on the cord, which after all these months has faded from a vibrant scarlet to a warm terracotta.
As visitors to the monastery, where my sister-in-law studies Tibetan and Sanskrit, we did not pray in the central shrine, but we looked around, amazed by the beauty of the wall murals, which depict moments from the life and teachings of the Buddha. Inside the shrine, sacred objects – prayer books and beads, small prayer wheels – jumbled with ordinary things: a pair of spectacles, a box of Kleenex, lip balm.
The shrine was severely damaged in the earthquake, but so far everyone is all right. There are already plans underway to rebuild, although no one knows how long that will take (or how much it will cost). All over the Kathmandu Valley, people are assessing the damage, tending to survivors and attempting to pick up the threads of their lives as best as possible.
I’ve never been in an earthquake. I’m told it’s terrifying because the thing we most take for granted – the stability of the earth under our feet – suddenly vanishes. And if we can’t trust the ground we stand on, what else is there?
When you read about the earthquake, did you do what I did – look around and wonder where you’d go, what you’d do, if the ground started to buckle and shake? Did you reconsider taking the lease on that new high-rise apartment? Not to be alarmist, but if you’ve been saying “it can’t happen here,” remember that the UAE is on the edges of an earthquake zone.
I wear a red string around my wrist. I got the string from Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, at a monastery just up the hill from the Boudhanath Stupa, in Kathmandu. I am told the small knot in the red string represents the blessing Rinpoche bestowed on the cord, which after all these months has faded from a vibrant scarlet to a warm terracotta.
As visitors to the monastery, where my sister-in-law studies Tibetan and Sanskrit, we did not pray in the central shrine, but we looked around, amazed by the beauty of the wall murals, which depict moments from the life and teachings of the Buddha. Inside the shrine, sacred objects – prayer books and beads, small prayer wheels – jumbled with ordinary things: a pair of spectacles, a box of Kleenex, lip balm.
The shrine was severely damaged in the earthquake, but so far everyone is all right. There are already plans underway to rebuild, although no one knows how long that will take (or how much it will cost). All over the Kathmandu Valley, people are assessing the damage, tending to survivors and attempting to pick up the threads of their lives as best as possible.
I’ve never been in an earthquake. I’m told it’s terrifying because the thing we most take for granted – the stability of the earth under our feet – suddenly vanishes. And if we can’t trust the ground we stand on, what else is there?
When you read about the earthquake, did you do what I did – look around and wonder where you’d go, what you’d do, if the ground started to buckle and shake? Did you reconsider taking the lease on that new high-rise apartment? Not to be alarmist, but if you’ve been saying “it can’t happen here,” remember that the UAE is on the edges of an earthquake zone.
I like to hope that in a crisis, I’d be one of those people who digs tirelessly through the rubble, that I would do the right thing and put others’ needs above my own. But does anyone really know how they’d react in a crisis? I suppose the climbers perched on the slopes of Everest (sacred to the Sherpas and, in the form of climbing fees, a huge source of revenue for the Nepali government) think of themselves as good people, maybe even heroic people. And yet some of these climbers are protesting against the decision to cancel the climbing season so that the Sherpas can return to their villages – if, in fact, their villages still exist.
The climbers say that because they’ve paid their $11,000 (Dh40,000) for a climbing permit, they should be allowed to continue in their attempt up the mountain, and they are angry that people are criticising their desire. Seems to me, however, that in addition to being utterly selfish, these people are seriously tempting fate: if you’re trying to climb a mountain and there’s already been an earthquake and avalanches, aren’t the odds pretty clearly stacked against you? Rather than continuing, perhaps they could think of their permit fees as “disaster relief donations” and count their blessings instead of their summits. They are alive, after all, and can return more or less unscathed to their lives outside of Nepal, where I imagine they have jobs that pay more than the paltry sum per day that is paid to the Sherpas who climb alongside them. It would seem that the earthquake revealed not only fault lines in the earth but fault lines in human character.
The earthquake and its aftermath are no longer front-page news; the story has been supplanted in the US by the riots in Baltimore and the drought in California, and in the UK by the general election. But for Nepal, the full extent of the tragedy is only now beginning to be felt, and the rebuilding will take years. How long do you suppose the suburban Buddhists in their Lululemon “namaste” T-shirts are going to keep paying attention?
That red cord around my wrist is my slim tie to Kathmandu. It’s a reminder to count my blessings, and to remember how quickly the ground can shift beneath our feet.
Deborah Lindsay Williams (mannahattamamma.com) is a professor of literature at NYU Abu Dhabi