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3 years of nepal earthquake

Building Back Better with the community!

By dZi Foundation

May 8^th, 2018

April 25 and May 12 of 2015 mark the two deadliest days in Nepal's recent history. The disaster unleashed by a 7.8 Magnitude earthquake on April 25 followed by numerous aftershocks daily was exacerbated by the 7.2 Magnitude earthquake on May 12. More than 9,000 lives were lost, hundreds of thousands of houses were destroyed, and thousands of public buildings - among them schools and health posts - were damaged.

In the months and years since these devastating days, at the dZi Foundation, we have worked non-stop to help our partner communities recover and rebuild.

Our local partner communities asked that school reconstruction and getting children back inside safe spaces be the first priority. Accordingly, school reconstruction over three years became the cornerstone of our community recovery. Before we set out to build schools, we made sure that the children were out of the risky or damaged classrooms. Therefore we built shelters for 4o schools within 3 months of the earthquakes.

After the schools, another vital infrastructure - drinking water systems - were also heavily affected by the earthquakes. Tap stands, reserve tanks and pipelines were severely damaged. In some instances, the sources of water either dried up or moved to higher or lower levels. Through earthquake relief small grants, we helped repair or rebuild these drinking water systems within 6 to 18 months of the quake in several communities. For some of our older projects, community members took the initiative to repair the systems.

In two communities, important irrigation canals were also damaged by landslides and ground fissures. We made sure farmers had proper irrigation facilities during the peak farming seasons by helping to repair both of these damaged structures. We did this before the second monsoon after the earthquakes through our earthquake relief small grant.

We were not able to help our community members rebuild their homes directly. That was something the Nepal Government's Reconstruction Authority was mandated to do. Instead, we helped our community members rebuild their homes indirectly.

We supported community members in growing cash crops and increasing their family's income, which would be necessary in order for them to rebuild their homes. We not only provided them with seeds for the cash crops of their choice - turmeric, ginger, cardamom, green pepper, and onion - but we also made sure that they received adequate training and extension support from our technicians. We supported them with farm implements, such as sprinkler nozzles, irrigation pipes, watering cans, drums to make liquid fertilizers, and plastic/waste ponds. We have continued to provide extension and technical support for these households. Many of our farmers have already been able to earn a substantial income from selling these crops.

School reconstruction has been the center of our community recovery program since the earthquakes. During the 3 years of our earthquake recovery effort, we have put our regular "deep development" program on hold by not soliciting other community development proposals from the communities. The bulk of our programs every year have been the reconstruction of damaged schools. So far, in the 3 year period, we have been able to rebuild 28 school reconstruction. This required transporting hundreds of thousands of pounds of external materials like steel, cement, fittings, and plywood to our working area, raising enough funds to rebuild all of these schools, working with local communities to collect enough local labor contribution, and coordinating with the Nepal Government to receive approval for the designs, among many other things.

We reconstructed the schools in 9 different communities - all located in extremely remote areas of Eastern Nepal. There was hardly any other external support in these areas, except during the first few months after the earthquakes. We signed a MoU with the Government of Nepal and the National Reconstruction Authority pledging to build the schools within our working area.

The logistics required to build at least 8 schools every year in widely distant areas reachable only through narrow hilly trails on foot were humongous. As we come to the end of our reconstruction phase, we are glad that so many students now have beautiful, strong and spacious classrooms. Since housing reconstruction has not picked up pace even after 3 years, our community members expressed that they were glad to see their children going to safe schools. "We feel safer sending our children to the school than when they are at home" - this has been a common sentiment for many of our community members after the school reconstruction.

Our school reconstruction projects wouldn't have been so successful without the immense participation and involvement of our community members. They are the true heroes of this recovery story. They continued to inspire us throughout this 3 year journey as we pushed ourselves to finish what we had committed to.

We still have a few more schools to finish rebuilding - they were pushed to a 4 year time frame due to our capacity to build more schools and the lengthy bureaucratic process we have to comply with. Now that much of our reconstruction work has been completed, we will also resume our "deep development" methodology so that we can support our local partner communities in a wide range of civic projects.

As we look back at the past 3 years, we are amazed at how much work we have accomplished - all because of the support that poured in from every corner of the world and because of our community's constant devotion to reconstruction. Even though we have finished rebuilding schools in the majority of our working areas, we still have a long way to go. Nepal is changing rapidly with its recent restructuring and the first local elections in more than 20 years. We are excited to be part of this change, as we help our rural partner communities address their vital needs in a holistic manner for years to come.

We thank everyone who has been with us during this 3 year journey of loss, fear, hope, learning, and recovery. As we leave behind the earthquake, we are excited that we will not have to reconstruct damaged infrastructure and can focus on building new ones where they did not exist. Because our reconstruction program coming to an end, we are now able to better disperse our resources to help two new communities - one of them in the district of Bhojpur where we have never worked before.