A young survivor of Nepal’s catastrophic flooding was reunited Friday with his mother, who had feared both her children were dead.
Matti Maya Tamang, 28, had desperately searched for her two missing children among the nearly 2,000 people that remain missing after catastrophic floods swallowed up Central Nepal’s Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading districts Wednesday morning. Around a quarter of those currently missing are foreign nationals, including at least 90 Americans.
“I had come to accept that both my children were no more,” the tormented mom said.
“All I could do was weep. I couldn’t hold myself together at all.”
Her eldest son, 8-year-old Zoyal Ghale, had been studying at school at the time of the flooding, which resulted from a massive chunk of ice snapping off a glacier in the Himalayas that overran the Lendhe River. The sudden disaster caught communities across the region completely off guard.
Suddenly, “it was so, so black,” he recalled.
The boy said he sprinted from the school into the forest with a friend and climbed the trees in Rasuwa to escape the surging waters. Ghale survived but suffered a broken leg and lacerations to his face before being airlifted to Kathmandu on Thursday.
When Ghale met journalist Sahana Bajracharya at a small hospital in Nuwakot around 11 a.m. On Thursday, nobody knew where his family was. The resourceful journalist was able to contact Tamang and put her in touch with the hospital, breaking the news that her son was alive.
Tamang could barely believe it. “When you told me you knew where Zoyal was, it didn’t sound real,” she recalled about her conversation with Bajracharya.
On Friday, Tamang finally reached the hospital where Ghale had been transferred, around a two-hour drive from their home. Ghale’s father, who works as a construction worker in Japan, was on his way as well, Tamang said.
She later learned her other child was also alive. “After I found the elder one, I felt my life was back,” she said.
When Ghale was asked whether the unimaginable experience had frightened him, the young boy shook his head: “No.”
In the viral moment that preceded this reunion, a massive chunk of ice had snapped off a glacier in the Himalayas and overrun the Lendhe River, triggering catastrophic flooding across Central Nepal’s Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading districts on Wednesday morning. The glacier collapse created a newly formed lake in the Himalayan mountains near the Tibetan border that has started to overflow, keeping rescuers on high alert for additional flooding.
There are 1,924 people who remain missing as of Friday. Nepalese authorities said all government personnel and members of the public assisting in the rescue efforts have been told to remain alert and take immediate action if necessary.
579 people have been confirmed dead in the epic destruction, while 4,451 people have been reported as rescued, according to Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority.
Ghale’s father continues his journey from Japan to reunite with his injured son at the Kathmandu hospital.