(NEPAL) Meet Prem Lal Tamang. He is a university student with big dreams and a lot of energy. He talks faster than anyone I know and I constantly remind him to slow down because I still find the Nepali accent difficult to understand. Each time I start to remind him, he says “yes, yes” and we laugh, because he knows, but is so excited about what he is saying that he speeds up.

Meet Prem Lal Tamang. He is a university student with big dreams and a lot of energy.

 

He talks faster than anyone I know and I constantly remind him to slow down because I still find the Nepali accent difficult to understand. Each time I start to remind him, he says “yes, yes” and we laugh, because he knows, but is so excited about what he is saying that he speeds up.

Prem looks like he has it all together, like nothing bad has ever happened to him. But he lived through the April earthquake in Nepal and at a recent psychosocial skills training, he told us his story.

The earthquake was on Saturday morning, which is the Holy Day in Nepal. People were not at work, children were not in school and many people were at places of worship, not at home. Many lives were spared because of that fact. Prem (whose name means “love”) was teaching Sunday School. When the earthquake started, all the teachers grabbed as many children as they could and covered them with their bodies to help protect them. As soon as they were able, the led the children out of the Sunday School building to the courtyard, where they were safe from potential collapse of the building. The entire church huddled together, waiting for the many aftershocks to subside. When they finally realized it was safe to travel, they began to leave the compound.

That was when they noticed people running on the street. Prem was confused: the earthquake seemed to be over, so why were people panicking? At this point in his story, Prem begins to laugh. When asked, people among the runners responded, “A tiger has escaped from the zoo!” The zoo is only a few blocks from the church, so church members joined the runners in getting some distance between them and the zoo. But the irony does not escape him: safe from one disaster but just to face another!

The laughter stops, though, as Prem relates the next part of his story. In the days following the earthquake, he volunteered to be part of a cleanup crew. It would have been hard work if cleaning up only meant stacking bricks and removing concrete. But his job was much more difficult: there were bodies to move. He describes how heavy they are to lift and how many people he grieved as he loaded them onto trucks to be taken to a mass grave outside of town. He takes the time to explain that this is not at all the way Nepali people deal with their dead and that the government promised to exhume the bodies later to have them properly burned.

And so Prem wants to work with children, to help them find ways to be normal again. He will lead the World Renew Children’s Psychosocial Groups in Manakamana, Nuwakot, when school begins again later in August. They will play and sing and have talent shows: all ways to be children and forget for a moment that most of them are still grieving loved ones who died in the earthquake.

He loved working with children before the earthquake; now he looks forward to bringing some post-earthquake hope, if only for an hour after school.

 

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