Day 5: Bare Hands

1. Day began early at 6:15 AM when Kedar dai (deerwalk driver) arrived at my place. We helped drop the relief items gathered at my house to Nagarik Hospital where my sister is working.

2. We came back to office with huge cache of clothes. There are nice wearable clothes donated by people from Baneswor. We will handover to Sudan, DW employee, who is basically collecting clothes from all Deerwalkers.

3. At around 1:00 we left for relief work. Today we wanted to do some cleaning ( inspired by Rudra’s reference of Times of India news about Nepalese cleaning Bhaktapur with bare hands.) we bought around two dozen helmets, 25 pairs of gloves and some brooms. As you can see in the pictures the place was totally devastated and one of the person from department of archaeology was happy to see us arrive. He asked us that police is fully occupied with the task of taking the idols trapped inside. We were asked to neatly arrange the pieces of bricks and pile them up neatly so that they can be used for restoration process. We worked fro around 4 hours with intermittent breaks in between and left around 6:00 PM.

We arrived at office around 7:45 PM. This was physically tasking work but very much satisfying. We have just begun working on the video and two of the students, Bhawana ( class of 15 ) and Sumit Shrestha ( Class of 16 ) have told me that they will coordinate from home and send at least one video by midnight.

We spent around Rs 10,000 buying gloves, helmets ( very cheap ones ) and around Rs 3,500 ( part of the same Rs 10,000) on food.