A month after the disaster that killed more than 8,000 people and left thousands injured and

homeless, Chapagaun, which lies half an hours drive from Kathmandu, remains a village
trapped in an anxious limbo. Many of the houses that withstood the quake and the dozens of
aftershocks that have followed are too badly cracked to be habitable and their owners too fearful
to set foot in them.
In the absence of permanent shelter, 200 villagers have established a temporary camp in a square,
where they eat and sleep together. While the men scavenge the ruins and try to demolish them
brick-by-brick, the women work if they can. Children, meanwhile, play in child-friendly spaces
(CFSs), hundreds of which have been set up across Nepal by NGOs. Part-creche, part-school and
part-psychosocial treatment centre, the spaces are designed to give children a fragment of the
normality destroyed by the quake.
At the Chapagaun CFS, run by the youth-led NGO Restless Development, girls sing hill country
songs and dance while the boys do jigsaw puzzles made from bits of cut-up calendars.
Neeva Shrestha is a 19-year-old student who was about to sit her exams when the quake struck.
She spends her days helping the other children and attempting to reassure her mother, who is
permanently dizzy and worried that the earth will split open again at any moment.
0:00
/
2:13
Embed
Survivors still living in tents talk of their fears of another major quake
Ive been trying to keep my mum calm; Im afraid too, but I am trying to be strong for her, she
says. We feel safe in the camp even though everyone is too afraid to go back home.
Unlike many of the camps set up in the aftermath of the quake, the temporary shelter in
Chapagaun has become a genuine refuge: the closeness of the community has been reinforced by
the disaster. The women there have no fear of sexual assault and the children no anxiety about
the traffickers who use such catastrophes to lure them away from their parents and into
orphanages or sexual exploitation.
We eat and pass the time together, says Neeva. The earthquake has made the future very dark,
but its nice to see the young children laughing and playing again.
We all stood and cried for a long time while the earth shook. We were so scared
Bachulaxmi Shrestha, earthquake survivor
The situation elsewhere in Nepal is far bleaker.

A helicopter flight across the central Sindhupalchok district one of the worst-affected areas
reveals an ugly tapestry. Crows swoop over tumbles of brick and concrete that were once homes
and schools, beams protrude through shattered roof tiles like open fractures and entire villages lie
flattened. Orange, blue, yellow and white tents and tarpaulins confetti the steeply terraced
hillsides, while people and animals stare up shyly from dwellings that look incapable of
sheltering any life at all.
Chautara municipality, the districts headquarters, has the look of a war zone. Many of its taller
buildings list at vertiginous and improbable angles, cricket stumps smashed by a brutal ball.
Around and beneath them, the hills of rubble disclose the occasional door, window and sheet of
twisted corrugated iron. High up on what must have been the second floor of one house, a
kitchen cupboard clings to an external wall, tins and packets of food still sitting on its shelves.
Krishna Gyawali, chief district officer of Sindhupalchok, sums up the damage with a handful of
numbers: 4,242 people killed across the district, 4,000 injured, 44 still missing and 95% of
homes destroyed.
Weve lost schools, health facilities and government offices, he says. Most of our villages are
in very remote areas; it takes five days to walk to some of them with relief items, but were
trying our best. People are in a very difficult situation; theyve lost their family and their children
are suffering. They want to go to safe places.

Boys in Chautara do a jigsaw puzzle made from cut-up calendars in a child-friendly space run by
the youth NGO Restless Development. Photograph: Sam Jones for the Guardian
About 400 people are camped out around the Norwegian Red Cross field hospital, sleeping 12 to
a tent. With the monsoon season expected to arrive within a few weeks, Oxfam, Save the
Children, the International Organisation for Migration, the Red Cross and others are working
with the police, army and government to keep people as safe as possible.
Among the technical discussions of the relative merits of different kinds of tarpaulins and the
possibility of upgrading to corrugated iron-roofed shelters, there is a familiar and nagging
concern.
The areas affected by the quake have traditionally been high-traffic areas for taking girls to
Indian brothels, but theyre also used for internal trafficking, says Bimal Rawal, a child
protection adviser for Save the Children. Although he praises the Nepalese government for

putting a moratorium on international adoptions and banning the registration of new orphanages
following the quake, Rawal says people are still trying to take children to orphanages in
Kathmandu, where they are used in funding appeals.
All the agencies need to keep an eye on children, he says. Everything is important but its
easy to overlook children in the relief efforts.
Weve lost schools, health facilities and government offices, he says. Most of our villages are
in very remote areas; it takes five days to walk to some of them with relief items, but were
trying our best. People are in a very difficult situation; theyve lost their family and their children
are suffering. They want to go to safe places.
Boys in the Nepalese village of Chautara do a jigsaw puzzle made from cut-up calendars in a
child-friendly space run by the youth NGO Restless Development.
Im still very frightened and nervous, says Bachulaxmi Shrestha. I lost my home and my
family has lost everything. We dont know what will happen next or if the government will come
to help us. All we can do now is try to reclaim whatever we can from our house.