The first shards of morning light had not appeared when the call came a week ago. Kaisang Ghale and his wife, Dechen, were still sleeping. A cousin was on the line from the Rasuwa region of Nepal where Ghale was born and raised before coming to Plymouth in 1999.
“My wife woke me, saying, ‘Get up, get up!” said Ghale, known to most as “KG,” owner of The Himalaya, Lobster Hut, and Momo Hut restaurants in Plymouth.
In the darkness, slivers of information unveiled a horror impossible to comprehend.
“She said, ‘Everybody’s dead,’” he recalled. “’The villages are gone.’”
Dechen was born in Ghattekhola, about a 10-minute drive from Timure, Ghale’s home. Both gone? How could this be, they wondered.
Before long, videos posted online showed an immense wall of muddy water roaring through narrow mountain settlements, obliterating everything in its path. The scenes were so dramatic many people initially thought they were A.I.-generated.
Since then, each dawn has brought more details about the tragedy and its aftermath. Scientists believe a massive landslide and glacier collapse – perhaps triggered by warming temperatures – took place about three miles high on Langtang Lirung, a mountain in the Himalayas close to Nepal’s border with Tibet. Water, debris, and rock hurtled down the Trishuli River through villages etched into narrow valleys. The wall of devastation traveled for miles, becoming more potent as the torrent gained momentum. For those in its path, there was little or no warning.
“My cousin said he, his wife, and his older sister were talking in their house, and then they felt like it was an earthquake,” Ghale said Monday. “They ran outside to look down and then saw a river coming, washing away all the houses. They ran downstairs, and then they ran up the hill. He and his wife survived. The older sister could not run fast enough. She couldn’t beat the water.”
As of Tuesday, more than 1,000 people were confirmed dead. About 4,400 remain missing, and at least 10,000 have been rescued. The number of homes and other buildings destroyed has yet to be calculated. Settlements dating to a thousand years or more have been erased.
Ghale said he hasn’t been able to tally the number of immediate and extended family members who were killed, but it includes his brother, Norbu Ghale, and his sister-in-law, Dolma Yangchen. They were visiting the region at the time of the flood and arrived the night before.
“I came up with about 25 names,” he said. “But there’s so many more that I couldn’t think of. If I have to estimate, maybe 70, 80, close to 100 people I know or was related to died – a cousin, another far cousin, a husband and wife, mother, and a daughter who just came from India after she graduated college, just spending time with the family. All four of them gone. And another, another guy I know and his sister – gone. Another wife and husband in their 40s, they’re gone. Basically, some whole families are gone.”
Almost as soon as the news became known in Plymouth, people began rallying to help the Ghales – known for their generosity – raise money for survivors.
The family started a GoFundMe page that by Tuesday evening had generated more than $38,000. Donations have ranged from $5 to $5,000.
The money will be used to “provide direct assistance to families and individuals affected by this disaster, particularly in Rasuwa,” according to a description on the page.
The small villages of “Timure, and Ghattekhola in Rasuwa are our home,” the family wrote. “They are places where our parents were born and raised and where generations of our family have lived, built homes, created memories, and raised their families.”
At Plymouth Fitness, where several Ghales are members, the GoFundMe campaign is being publicized, said General Manager Paul Baldrate. The club also plans to make a substantial donation to the cause, he said.
“We had a staff member go through a difficult time in the past and the Ghale family was just phenomenal,” Baldrate said. “They’re just that kind of people.”
Jim Doyle, who manages The Himalaya for the Ghales, said the family is donating 50 percent of its sales from Monday through this coming Sunday to aiding the rebuilding effort in Nepal.
Squinny’s Pizza is also setting aside an unspecified amount of money from a promotion.
Pompey Delafield, president of the Rotary Club of Plymouth, said it is organizing a drive to aid the Betrawati Bazaar area in the Uttargaya region of the country. Delafield, who has lived in Nepal, said more details will be forthcoming “when we get closer to identifying an appropriate way to get the money to the desired population.”
Meantime, daily life for Ghale remains a foggy struggle. He leans heavily on his Buddhist faith for a semblance of stability. But even those deep-rooted beliefs are not a buffer from human pain. In this moment – more than 7,000 miles removed from his place of origin – Ghale cannot rationalize the enormity of what has taken place.
“My mind is kind of like mush,” he said. “I just obviously feel like, ‘What can I do?’ I mean, there’s nothing I can do, and I don’t even know where to start. I have no motivation of life. It feels like I’m dead inside, you know?”
Dechen, he said, also “is not doing well, but she’s hanging in there. She’s the one that tells me, ‘You’ve got to be strong.’”
“It’s like a bad nightmare,” he said. “I was confused 100 percent for the first few days, and I’m still confused as hell.”
Mark Pothier can be reached at mark@plymouthindependent.org.