Photo by Mark Edward Harris.
Nepal’s April earthquake killed thousands of people and decimated the country’s vital tourism industry. Months after disaster struck, Mark Edward Harris checks in with Nepali filmmakers and Sherpas, and finds a people who are waiting for the crowds to return.
BY MARK EDWARD HARRIS
But at 11:56 A.M. on April 25, priorities changed in an instant—from creating films to mere survival. A magnitude 7.8 earthquake violently shook the earth under them and their 27 million fellow countrymen and women, killing more than 9,000, injuring an estimated 23,000, and displacing more than 450,000 people.
Six months later, I was invited to give a lecture on still photography at the film school, which is, for the foreseeable future, housed in a mishmash of structures next to where their four-story main campus once stood. My host was the school’s very dapper principal and acting coach, Binod Paudel.
As the students gathered for my presentation, I spoke with Paudel about that terrifying day in April. The school was actually off that week, but Paudel was headed to the campus for a meeting with guests. “Somehow I managed to get to the college just after the earthquake,” he said. “The base and pillars of our main building were completely cracked and the building was [tilting]. Some of my staff and I dared to go inside and save some cameras—like our Red camera and a zoom lens.”
Much of the campus collapsed under the force of the quake. Aftershocks collapsed half the building. “Two months later we hired experts to demolish it so we could at least continue the school on the grounds in tents, and in our one story studio and in some rental spaces,” Paudel said. Unbelievably, no one from the school was injured, “but there was nothing left.
“Our condition is very critical but I am trying my best to provide quality education to my students,” he continued. “Since I am also a filmmaker and I have a passion in filmmaking, I cannot stop the college. This is the only film college in Nepal and our students are creating a new wave in the Nepalese film industry. I have a dream of introducing my students all around the world through Nepalese films. We want to create our own narrative in cinema.”
The school is succeeding: a student, Min Bahadur Bham, recently screened his feature film, Kalo Pothi (“The Black Hen”), at the Venice International Film Festival, and other student films have received awards at international film festivals. “The earthquake broke us so badly but we have been trying to overcome the situation,” Paudel said.
After my presentation, I had the students arrange themselves in their studio and asked for a couple of volunteers to help me light the set with their equipment. I wasn’t brave enough to handle the ancient tungsten lights the school had acquired secondhand from India decades ago, and which had to be “hot wired” directly into the power outlets. But they are making more than the best with what they have. In fact, it seems clear that they have the most important ingredient for success: desire.
Beyond the school and throughout Nepal, evidence of the earthquake and aftershocks dot the landscape. According to UNESCO, more than 30 monuments in the Kathmandu Valley collapsed and 120 incurred significant damage in the initial quake and the 7.3 aftershock that occurred a little more than two weeks later. This is in addition to the thousands of destroyed monasteries, shrines, office buildings, apartment complexes, and private homes that did not escape the wrath of one of nature’s most terrifying phenomenons.
Before heading out of Los Angeles for this two-week post-earthquake assignment in Nepal, I watched Everest, Hollywood’s latest account of the events that took place on the earth’s highest mountain in May 1996. Eight climbers died that day. On April 18, 2014, an avalanche near base camp killed 16 Nepali guides. The avalanche triggered by the most recent April earthquake eclipsed that number, killing 19 at the mountain’s base camp and marking the deadliest day in Everest’s history.
I asked my Himalayan guide, the Nepali superstar climber Maya Sherpa, for her take on Everest as we trudged up toward Tengboche Monastery in what I considered a snowstorm and what she probably considered another day at the office. She said, matter-of-factly, “The Sherpas feel that ego got in the way of good decisions.”
Maya says she is the only Nepali woman alive today who has summited Everest from both the south (Nepali side) and the north (Tibetan side). The other Nepali woman, Pemba Doma Sherpa, with whom she shared that distinction, died in 2007 on nearby Lhotse. “I met her on Cho Oyu in 2004,” said Maya. “She was a good lady. When I was on the north side of Everest, she was on Lhotse when she fell to her death after making it to the summit.” Maya has also summited K2, the second-highest mountain in the world but considered much more dangerous than Everest, with roughly one person dying for every four who make it to the summit.
While she’s used to the dangers of high-altitude climbing, Maya was not expecting that her life would be on the line in Nepal’s capital, at an elevation of 4,600 feet. “I was in Kathmandu attending a ceremony with more than 200 people when the earthquake hit,” she said. “All the buildings were moving and everything looked distorted. We were holding each other’s hands and praying to God. Some were crying, shouting, scared about their families. I was thinking about my daughter at home, and my husband and friends on an Everest expedition.
“I knew that day many friends where going to climb the icefall there,” she said. “That’s the worst place to be in an earthquake. But they were very lucky nothing happened in the icefall. But the people at Everest base camp weren’t so lucky.
“After three hours I reached my home and saw my daughter and family,” Maya continued. “They were all O.K., but they had so much fear on their faces. I packed a tent and some clothes and food for us and we went to open ground near my friend’s house and we all camped there together for about a week.”
In the months following the earthquake Maya and her husband gathered $30,000 from their friends and sponsors around the world to support earthquake victims. But the crisis continues.
“Sherpa lives have really been affected because most are involved in tourism directly or indirectly,” explained Maya. “You have seen in the Khumbu area that there are 60 percent less tourists. That means lots of Sherpas have no jobs this year. Some trekking trails were damaged by the earthquake like the ones in the Manasalu and Langtang areas, which will take a few years to rebuild. But there are so many others places in Nepal like around Everest, Annapurna, Makalu, and Kanchenjunga, where people are still afraid to come because of all the bad news they’ve heard and read about in the media. But lots of the negative news is not true. Our trekking in the Himalayas, as you’re experiencing, is very safe, and we Nepalis are waiting to welcome visitors. We have hope they will come like before.”
In 2014, the country was ranked 145th of the 187 countries on the Human Development Index (H.D.I.) struggling with high levels of poverty. Nepal is the 90th country I’ve had the opportunity to work in. Without exception, I have met incredible people in every country, but I have never met a group of people as gentle and tough in one body as the Sherpas of Nepal. Men, women, and children continue to carry loads on their backs that would shock Charles Atlas, up and down mountain trails—especially in the aftermath of the earthquake when transporting rebuilding materials became a matter of life and death.
The Nepalis see nature as a friend, but even friends can have bad days, and April 25, 2015, was of them. But it is these same forces that pushed up their sacred Himalayas, which are a tourism mecca. And tourism plays a vital role in the Nepali economy.
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