Nepal Will Rise Again

Everything I wrote first sounded like a brochure, and this is not a moment for brochures.

On 26 August a flood came down the Bhote Koshi and took the Rasuwagadhi border crossing with it, along with homes, roads and livelihoods in a valley our family has worked in for years. Contractors, guides, cooks and porters who work with us were caught in it. In the days that followed, our people joined the rescue and the searching, not only in Rasuwa but wherever hands were needed, as crews from every region did, because that is how it works here. We lost friends and family. Some of what those days held I will not write about, out of respect for the families still waiting for news, ours among them.

So this is not a piece telling you everything is fine. It is a piece telling you what Nepal does after days like these, because it has happened before.

What I have watched this country do

In 2015 the earthquake flattened whole districts, and the world's headlines said Nepal was finished. By the following spring, the trails were open. Lodges that had been rubble were serving dal bhat. The men and women who carried the stones out carried new beams back in, on the same shoulders, up the same hills. Nobody sent them a schedule. Rebuilding is simply what these valleys do, the way the rivers run downhill.

The same thing is happening in Rasuwa now. The road crews were cutting through the debris while the water was still brown. Lodge families were accounting for their neighbours before they accounted for their losses. This is not resilience as a slogan on a poster. It is people who have never had the option of giving up, not giving up, again.

What the flood did not take

It did not take the Khumbu, where our October groups will walk to Everest Base Camp under clear skies. It did not take Annapurna or Manaslu or Mustang. It did not take Kathmandu's temples or Pokhara's lake or a single tiger from Chitwan. I have written a separate, factual page on exactly which treks are open, and the honest answer is nearly all of them.

And it did not take the thing that brings people back to Nepal a second and third time, which was never only the mountains. It is the people in front of them. That is intact. If anything, days like these show you exactly how intact.

If you want to help

Come. I know how that sounds from a man who sells treks, so let me spell out the mechanics. A trekker's money does not sit in Kathmandu. It goes to the porter from Solukhumbu, the lodge family in Ghandruk, the driver from Chitwan, the farmer whose vegetables feed the teahouse. Tourism is how the hills earn, and a cancelled autumn hurts precisely the people who lost the most this monsoon. Coming is not insensitive. Staying away, with the best of intentions, is what actually deepens the damage.

If you want to give directly as well, use the Government of Nepal's official relief channel at opmcm.gov.np rather than any private appeal that arrives in your inbox. After every disaster the frauds arrive faster than the aid.

The word I keep coming back to

There is a phrase Nepalis use, हामी फेरि उठ्छौं, we will rise again. It is not defiance and it is not optimism exactly. It is closer to a plain statement of fact, said by people who have done it before and know the weight of it. The border will be rebuilt. The trail sections will be recut. The valley will bury its grief the way mountain communities have always had to, and it will plant again in spring.

Nepal will rise again. It is already rising. Come and see it happen. There is no better time to be a guest in this country than when your being here actually matters.

Written by Shreejan Simkhada, CEO and co-founder of The Everest Holiday, a family-run trekking company in Kathmandu. Every booking helps fund our Nagarjun Learning Center.