Survivors of the 2015 quake that killed almost 9,000 people around Kathmandu now face another challenge they didn’t expect
Ratna Awale counts herself lucky. She and her husband, Prem, and their two sons survived the devastating 7.8-magnitude earthquake in Nepal on 25 April 2015 that killed almost 9,000 people.
But her narrow four-storey home in Patan, a sprawling, historical city south of Kathmandu, was badly damaged. “There were big cracks from the back of the house to the front wall, and half the ground floor collapsed,” she says.
We are caught between paying the loan and feeding ourselves
There are more than 820,000 houses – the scale is massive
Related: Rubbish playgrounds: can upcycling help Kathmandu defeat trash?
Written by Stephen Starr in Patan
This news first appeared on https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/dec/05/kathmandu-earthquake-debt-nepal under the title “Nepal: first came the earthquake, then came the debt”. Bolchha Nepal is not responsible or affiliated towards the opinion expressed in this news article.
