The glue is still fresh on the posters lining the hospital wall, each one a face, a story, a desperate plea: a schoolgirl in her uniform, a chubby-cheeked baby, a couple on their wedding day, a young man on a mountain peak, a girl peeking from behind a door. These are but a fraction of the nearly 3,000 people missing after flash floods tore through the Himalayas, erasing entire villages from the map.
By Saturday morning, Nepal had recovered 669 bodies, but many remote areas remain accessible only by army helicopters, and rescuers admit they can't guess how many more lie beneath the mud. The morgues in Chitwan are overflowing, with a makeshift building erected to house the dead. Some bodies were carried so far downstream they turned up in neighboring India.
At Tribhuvan University teaching hospital in Kathmandu, four days after the disaster, desperate relatives still crowd the police desk to register missing loved ones. The injured fill the wards, and people frantically scan patient lists, hoping for a sign. With information scarce and affected areas cut off, many have turned to poster-making as a form of communication.
Yavraj Lama's eyes welled up as he glued a photo of one-year-old Sijan Tawang, cradled in his mother's arms, to the wall. Next to it hung a picture of 12-year-old Sahil, his brother. "We are numb," Lama said. "Our main focus is trying to find baby Sijan. He was so sweet and innocent; it's impossible for us to think he is not with us any more." But then the crushing truth: "Their whole village has disappeared, so we have no hope left that any of them survived."
Monita Nepali, 22, howled as a poster of her missing husband Vishal Nepali, 30, went up. Married six months ago, he drove regularly to the Nepal-Tibet border. She'd spoken to him an hour before the floods hit, during his morning walk in Rusawa. He promised to call that evening; his phone has been off ever since. "I don't want to live on the face of this earth without him," she said, still believing he'll return. "I feel it in my heart he will come back."
Tulmaya Tamang, 36, brought posters for 12 missing family members, including her five-month-old niece, from a village in Rusawa. "Our family is under tremendous stress," she said. "So many are gone, and those of us who are left behind are struggling." Now they're hoping for bodies, just for closure: "If we had the bodies, then at least we could have peace. Otherwise, the family will never stop wondering and this pain will go on for a very long time."
At least 900 of the missing were working on hydropower projects along the Trishuli River corridor, many of them low-paid laborers, including at least 63 from India. Dramatic footage showed Nepali soldiers pulling survivors from a tunnel at the Trishuli-1 project, but the army believes another 100 people are still trapped, along with dozens more in the Trishuli-3 plant.
Among them is 24-year-old Sujan Nepali, who'd just finished a night shift and was asleep when the wall of water came. His sister, Sushisha Maluwar, returns to the hospital trauma center daily. "We haven't lost hope," she said. "We are writing down his name at the hospitals and putting up his photographs everywhere, hoping that we might find him somewhere. Maybe he has already been rescued. Maybe he had managed to escape and survive."
Hope, it seems, is the last thing to wash away.