Add the Gazzetta del Sud as a source
When he saw the mountain of water and mud heading towards the school he didn’t have a moment’s hesitation. Zoyal Ghale, just 8 years old, ran away and climbed a tree. He is one of the children who survived the devastating floods that hit the Rasuwa district of Nepal on Wednesday, resulting in 675 confirmed deaths so far and nearly three thousand missing. But above all he is a lucky child: he managed to reunite with his mother, who now thought he was dead, also thanks to the help of a Reuters journalist.
The mother herself, Matti Maya Tamang, 28 years old, tells the story. That morning Zoyal and her younger brother had gone to school in the northern district of Rasuwa. The woman was staying at home when she suddenly heard a very loud noise. “It felt like an earthquake,” he says. Instead, it was the enormous mass of a glacier, near the summit of Langtang Lirung, that collapsed into the valley and triggered an avalanche of mud and rocks that engulfed northern Nepal and Tibet.
The young woman immediately rushed towards school, a 15-20 minute drive from home, but an unrecognizable landscape appeared before her eyes. «You couldn’t understand where the school was, where the market was. There was just water, rocks and mud everywhere,” he said.
The desperate search and the finding in hospital
In the following days Tamang desperately searched for his two children in all the temporary shelters. Almost immediately he found the youngest still alive, but there was no news of Zoyal.
Yesterday, by pure chance, Reuters reporter Sahana Bajracharya and her crew saw him at Chakra Dev hospital in Nuwakot district. They had learned that a child had been hospitalized with a broken leg and some scratches on his face, but authorities did not know where his family was.
Zoyal was clutching a peculiar thing in her left hand – two 10 rupee notes. The policemen who rescued him had given them to him to convince him to go to hospital with them.
The child agreed to be filmed by the crew in the hope of finding his mother and the journalist left her mobile number at the hospital. After further fruitless searches, Tamang managed to get the reporter’s number and called her.
“I had already lost all hope”
When Bajracharya confirmed to her that her son was alive and that he had in the meantime been transferred to a hospital in Kathmandu, the woman found it hard to believe it. “I had already lost all hope,” he said with tears in his eyes.
Yesterday the young mother reached the hospital thanks to the journalist, who provided her with a means of transport, and was finally able to hug Zoyal again.
Tamang and his family were among the lucky few who suffered no losses in the tragedy. Meanwhile, Unicef announces that there are at least 17 thousand children in need of immediate assistance, in the hope of finding their loved ones still alive.