Nepali Minnesotans hold vigil in solidarity with Himalayan flood victims
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At the steps of the state Capitol Tuesday night, a few dozen people gathered around electric candles arranged in the shape of the flag of Nepal.
The flag’s two stacked triangles represent the mountains the country is known for. Recently, a glacier in the Himalayas collapsed, triggering massive landslides and flash floods that have killed more than 1,000 people. About 4,000 people were still missing as of Tuesday.
The steep terrain makes the region prone to landslides, said Bijay Shrestha, who was a civil engineer in Nepal before moving to the U.S. But he’s never heard of anything as severe as this disaster.
“We don’t even know if there is any record in the past 50 or 100 years that it happened like that,” he said. “So not in our memory.”
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He’s heard from former colleagues about hydropower workers who are trapped in tunnels. Now retired, he likes to volunteer his skills. And he was just in Nepal for a visit to the capital city of Kathmandu ten days before the flood.
“If I knew,” he said, “I would have extended my stay.”
Instead, he’s been glued to the news. As President of the Association of Nepalis in Minnesota, Shrestha helped organize Tuesday’s vigil as well as a fundraiser for flood relief efforts. He spent time with members of other communities from the same part of the world, praying with members of the Tibetan community and setting up a meeting with an Indian diasporic group.
Mangala Sharma is originally from Bhutan. Like Shresta, she was in Nepal last month. She went on a pilgrimage through the area that was devastated. She planned to spend more time in Kathmandu afterward but returned from her trip early to say goodbye to her older brother. He died of cancer two days after she got back to the U.S.
She said she came to the vigil to be with other people who understood something of what she’s going through.
“I feel like my trauma could be divided just to be among everybody else who is thinking about Nepal and who love Nepal and who has family there,” she said.
Rashi Chaulagai is one of those with friends and family in the affected area of Nepal. Rescuers are searching for her niece’s husband, who had been working downstream from the glacier collapse. She said crews had to take a helicopter, then walk eight hours to reach the spot linked to his cell phone location.
“I think we will not get good news,” she said. “But we are still, we can still hope, right?”
Shreejana Acharya went to the vigil from work. Her family members in Nepal are safe, but she said she feels closely connected to those lost. She’s still trying to wrap her mind around what happened to them.
“Thinking about those deaths, it’s like a horror movie,” she said. “It’s not like a real thing.”
She said she’s heartened seeing how Nepalis are feeding and helping one another back home.
“We as Nepali people are resilient. We’ll come back, no doubt about it,” she said.
There are about 3,400 Nepalis in Minnesota, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
