Zoyal Ghale, an eight-year-old boy who fled into a forest and climbed trees to survive Nepal's devastating floods, was reunited with his mother on Friday after she had feared that both he and his brother had died at their school.
Ghale had been airlifted alone from the badly affected northern district of Rasuwa a day earlier. He had suffered a broken leg and injuries to his face. His 28-year-old mother, Matti Maya Tamang, meanwhile, had been moving between shelters and collection centres searching for her two missing sons.
"At the fourth place too, my children's names were not on the list, and they were not there," Tamang told Reuters. "I had come to accept that both my children were no more. All I could do was weep. I couldn’t hold myself together at all."
UNICEF said at least 17,000 children had been affected by flooding across Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading districts north of Kathmandu. The UN children's agency said it was working with Nepalese authorities to identify and register children separated from their families and help reunite them.
PHONE CALL TO REUTERS HELPS MOTHER FIND SON
Tamang and her family were among those who survived the disaster. At least 580 people have been confirmed dead, while around 2,500 remain missing across Nepal and China's Tibet.
After several unsuccessful attempts to locate her children, Tamang obtained the phone number of Reuters journalist Sahana Bajracharya on Thursday. Bajracharya had encountered Ghale a few hours earlier at a small hospital in neighbouring Nuwakot district.
Bajracharya and a Reuters team had visited the hospital after hearing that a young boy had been brought there, while officials were unable to locate his family.
Before Ghale was airlifted for further medical treatment, Bajracharya spoke to him. She said the boy agreed to be filmed in the hope that the footage would help locate his relatives.
Bajracharya left her contact number at the hospital, and Tamang called her several hours later.
When Bajracharya informed Tamang that Zoyal was alive and had been moved to Kathmandu, the mother said she initially struggled to believe the news.
"When you told me that you knew where Zoyal was, it didn't sound real," she said. "I had already given up that I would find them."
Tamang had also managed to locate her younger son alive.
"After I found the elder one, I felt my life was back," she said.
A LANDSCAPE THAT WAS ALMOST UNRECOGNISABLE
The two brothers had left for school in a school vehicle on Wednesday morning, while Tamang stayed home weaving.
She then heard a sound that resembled an earthquake.
The floods began after the lower section of a glacier near Langtang Lirung mountain collapsed on Wednesday and crashed into the valley below. Videos shared on social media and verified by Reuters showed that the resulting ice-and-rock avalanche triggered a massive landslide.
"I could see everything was being swept away," Tamang said. "I thought my children were getting swept away too."
She attempted to reach the school, which normally took around 15 to 20 minutes by car, but found the area completely transformed. The flood had destroyed the school building.
"You could not understand where the school was, where the market was," she said. "There was only water, stones and mud everywhere."
The landslide pushed huge amounts of water and debris through northern Nepal and into Tibet, destroying entire communities within minutes.
THE BOY WHO HAD 20 RUPEES
Reuters found Ghale at around 11 am on Thursday at the 15-bed Chakra Dev Hospital in Nuwakot. Hospital staff and others there appeared to have no information about his family.
The boy had fractured his right leg and had scratches and bruises across his face. He was holding two 10-rupee notes tightly in his left hand.
Officials said police officers who rescued him had given him the money to convince him to accompany them to the hospital.
Ghale recalled that he had been attending classes when the flood hit. Suddenly, he said, "it was so, so black".
He fled from the school into a nearby forest with a friend and climbed into trees to stay above the floodwaters.
When asked if he had been scared, he shook his head.
"No."
MOTHER AND SON FINALLY TOGETHER
On Friday, Tamang reached the Kathmandu hospital where Ghale had been transferred, roughly two hours from their home.
With bus services suspended, Bajracharya arranged transportation for Tamang.
After several days of desperately searching for her children, Tamang finally stood beside her son's hospital bed. She said Ghale's father, who works as a construction labourer in Japan, was also travelling to see him.
The devastating flood has dramatically changed life in Rasuwa. For Tamang, however, a small sense of normality had returned with her son's recovery.
"Oh, he is always a mischievous kid," she said. "This is not his first broken bone."
