Your search within this document for 'Earthquake' resulted in 17 matching pages.
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“...HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies Volume 37 | Number 2 Article 12 December 2017 Becoming Rasuwa Relief: Practices of Multiple Engagement in Post-Earthquake Nepal Austin Lord Cornell University, al947(a>cornell.edu Galen Murton James Madison University, galen.murton(a)colorado.edu Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya Recommended Citation Lord, Austin and Murton, Galen (2017) "Becoming Rasuwa Relief: Practices of Multiple Engagement in Post-Earthquake Nepal," HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies: Vol. 37 : No. 2, Article 12. Available at: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol37/iss2/12 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Macalester College Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. This Research Article is brought to you for free and open access by the DigitalCommons(2)Macalester College at DigitalCommons(2)Macalester College. It...”
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“...Becoming Rasuwa Relief: Practices of Multiple Engagement in Post- Earthquake Nepal Acknowledgements The authors would like to express their sincere gratitude to all those who contributed to and supported the work of Rasuwa Relief. First and foremost; we would like to acknowledge our founding team members at Rasuwa Relief: Bob Beazley, Bikram Karki, Sneha Moktan, Arya Gautam, Prasiit Sthapit, Upasana Khadka, and Lakpa Sherpa. This is an incredible group of people who volunteered hundreds of hours, and made Rasuwa Relief possible. As our efforts evolved, many others joined our team and made important contributions, particularly Nathaniel and Amanda Needham, Jennifer Bradley, Rabi Thapa, Johanna Fricke, and Prakriti Yonzon. Our work with Rasuwa Relief prompted many meaningful collaborations with a variety of different individuals and institutions. While there are perhaps too many to name, we would like to thank DROKPA, Mojgone Azemun and Avaaz.org, Bodhi Garrett and Craig Lovell of WeHelpNepal...”
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“...Becoming Rasuwa Relief: Practices of Multiple Engagement in Post-Earthquake Nepal Austin Lord Galen Murton In this article, we reflect on the multiple nature of our engagements in the wake of the 7.8m earthquake that struck Nepal on April 25th 2015. Specifically, we trace the events, experiences, decisions, positions, and processes that constituted our work with a post-earthquake volunteer initiative we helped to form, called Rasuwa Relief. Using the concept of multiplicity (cf. Mol 2002), we consider the uncertain process by which Rasuwa Relief began to cohere, as a collective of diverse efforts, interventions, projects, and commitments, and how Rasuwa Relief was continually and multiply enacted through practices of engagement. As a collaborative effort that coordinated and consolidated many of our post-earthquake interventions over a period of two years, Rasuwa Relief was always in a state of becoming. This process of becoming, we suggest, indexed and informed the multiple ways that we...”
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“...On Being Multiple In the wake of the earthquake that struck Nepal on April 25th 2015, we helped to form a volunteer disaster- response initiative that we called Rasuwa Relief. Like the countless others who attempted to help at this time, we never expected to be directly involved in humanitarian ‘relief work.’ However, our embodied experiences of the earthquake and our deepening relationships within Nepal compelled us to reorient ourselves in relation to the disaster. Amid the uncertainties of the aftermath and still trying to process our own lived experiences, we began, like many others, to act in multiple ways. We hoped that, but were often unsure if, we could become helpful. In early May 2015, we formed Rasuwa Relief and made an informed decision to engage in new ways, and to sustain and elaborate these engagements as the aftermath unfolded around us. As a collaborative effort that indexed a variety of different post-earthquake orientations, understandings of disaster, and expressions...”
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“...struggled to navigate the uncertain terrain of post-earthquake Nepal. We tried to help while slowly learning how to do so, acting first based on a kind of reflex and, later, more reflexively. While working with Rasuwa Relief, we were constantly attempting to balance a variety of commitments to diverse kinds of people, places, principles, and positionalities: that is, we were always multiple. Uneven Narrations of Disaster Disaster response efforts, humanitarian or otherwise, are often shaped and adapted in relation to particular pat- terns of ascertainment and narration, fueled by a sense of urgency and rupture. In the aftermath of disaster, dif- ferently positioned narrators seek to frame the disaster and to reinterpret the relationship between a cataclysmic event and the latent crises or vulnerabilities that preceded it (Hewitt 1983; Das 1996). Reflecting on the different narrations (and narrators) circulating in the aftermath of the 2001 earthquake in the Indian state of Gujarat, Edward Simpson...”
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“...the destruction firsthand, having spent years working in Nepal prior to the event, and having many friends in earthquake-affected areas, we felt a visceral and personal compulsion to respond. In many ways, choosing to act was part of our own processes of sense-making in the face of extreme uncertainty, a way to channel our anxieties and concerns into what we hoped was right action. In the sec- tions below, we provide some background on where each of us was on the day of first major earthquake. On April 25th, Austin Lord was in the Langtang Valley in north Rasuwa District, a high-Himalayan valley, home to a community of culturally-Tibetan pastoralists that is also considered a popular trekking destination (Lim 2008). At the exact moment of the earthquake, he was talking to a local man, now a friend, about a proposed plan for hydro- power development in the Valley. When the earthquake struck, landslides and avalanches came down throughout the valley, including a massive co-seismic avalanche...”
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“...Galen was en route to Kathmandu, we had a prelim- inary conversation about damage patterns and perceived gaps in the post-earthquake landscape. Our conversation eventually shifted to Rasuwa, where we had both con- ducted research together in the recent past (Murton, Lord, & Beazley 2016) and which remained largely overlooked. Rasuwa was centrally isolated between the ‘humanitarian hubs’ being established in Gorkha and Sindhupalchowk districts, and was largely (but unsurprisingly) cut off from Kathmandu by the politically dominant district of Nuwakot and chronic road access problems. Austin was acutely aware of the destruction that had occurred in Langtang and the massive uncertainties faced by dis- placed survivors. Our colleague Bob Beazley provided a detailed report on damage in Lower Rasuwa based on his reconnaissance trip in the days immediately following the earthquake. Our conversations with friends and research contacts in Rasuwa also indicated that relief efforts had not yet reached...”
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“...statement via social media. Like many others who have found themselves at the frontiers of disaster response in the 21st century, we launched a crowd-funding campaign to support our initial efforts. We had become a diverse collective of nine people [see Acknowledgments], and we called ourselves Rasuwa Relief. Disaster & Unevenness in Rasuwa Heading upstream along the Trishuli River with our fellow volunteers during our first major relief mission on May 10th, we could see that the impacts of the earthquake and the unevenness of response remained profound. The floodplains outside the market town of Betrawati at the border of Nuwakot and Rasuwa had been transformed into a tangle of IDP camps and emergency medical facil- ities, where dozens of NGO tents with competing global logos clustered into new enclaves of triage—a place where the international humanitarian community was both needed and conspicuous. And yet the further one trav- eled northward into the hills of Rasuwa, relief units and humanitarian...”
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“...Kathmandu and Langtang—that our commitment to informed action and to being co-present was an important ethical decision. Furthermore, these firsthand experiences gained while attempting to do ‘relief work’ had shown us that our situ- ated knowledge of Rasuwa was valuable in multiple ways. Put differently, we saw that an academically and ethno- graphically informed understanding of post-earthquake locations as more than just ‘dots on a map’ allowed us to “act productively as brokers between multiple actors” (Shneiderman 2015:1). Thus, as the terms of our volun- Figure 3- At the time of the 73 magnitude earthquake that struck on May 12,2015, our team of volunteers was in Rasuwa distributing solar panels, tarps, and other relief materials. Here two volunteers watch as dust rises from the valley below immediately after the shock. (Lord, 2015) HIMALAYA Volume37,Number2 93...”
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“...Displaced survivors from the Langtang community gather to perform funerary rites at Phuntsok Choeling Monastery in Kathmandu in June 2015, forty-nine days after the earthquake. This Tibetan Buddhist monastery also served as their displaced persons camp. (Lord, 2015) Figure 5- In October 2015, Rasuwa Relief team members and collaborators walk through the upper part of Langtang village, which was leveled by the blast from the avalanche (visible in the background). During this trip, we conducted a detailed damage assessment that would help facilitate the process of resettlement and reconstruction. (Lord, 2015) teerism began to change following the second earthquake, we made a multiple commitment to continue our work, amid and despite the confusion. Engagement and Praxis in the Post-Earthquake Landscape For two years after the earthquake, we worked as Rasuwa Relief on a variety of different projects—ranging from interventions focused on immediate humanitarian relief to collaborative community-based...”
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“...understand these projects as part of a larger commitment to polyvocality in the wake of disaster—providing space for at-risk commu- nities to describe their own conditions of vulnerability and narrate their own process of recovery (Schuller 2014; Liboiron 2015; Gergan 2016). Through Rasuwa Relief, we also undertook a social media campaign that we hoped would provide insight into the situation ‘on the ground’ in Rasuwa and promote greater understanding of the social and political complexities of the earthquake aftermath. With these efforts, we tried to focus attention on the socially constructed dimensions of Figure 8. In March 2016, Amchi Tenjing Bista administers care to an elderly woman with chronic health problems in the village of Gatlang. These mobile health camps allowed a team of amchi (practitioners of Tibetan medicine/Sowa Rigpa) to treat over 1,000 patients in Upper Rasuwa. (Lord, 2016) 96 HIMALAYA Fall2017...”
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“...groups, such as persons with disabilities, and to include or represent mar- ginalized voices. Through this work, we sought to critique and counter the kind of official representations of disaster that “are dominant to the point of ubiquity” (Liboiron 2015:147) and that reproduce the uneven delineation of certain ‘acceptable’ risks in Nepal. While constructing these critical narratives, we tried to limit the effect and affect of our own mediations and focused on promoting the voice and agency of earthquake-affected Nepalis over our own. However, while this approach was inflected by the ethics of social science, it was neither completely objective nor apolitical. In fact, and especially with respect to Rasuwa, we acted specifically and intentionally to make certain people, places, practices, processes, and pasts more visible than others—to draw attention to certain needs still unmet, like pervasive struggles with mental health, and to explicate the complex process of reconstruction (and its politics)...”
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“...allow political theatre or instrumental narratives of‘resilience’ to obscure the lived struggles of Nepalis (Tamang 2015; Leve 2015), nor can we tolerate the common practice of “planning to forget,” as Simpson has described (2013). As Mark Schuller has argued while reflecting on his own positions and commitments in post-earthquake Haiti, “We have a responsibility to learn from our collective mistakes, to understand how the system is maintained and can change, and make the most effective use of the life stories, frustrations, injustices, and analyses that people entrust to those of us who are “insiders without” (2014: 412). Multiple engagements are needed in post-earthquake Nepal and in other post-di- saster contexts, to combat confusion and amnesia with clarity and an informed will to remember the patterns of inequality and structural violence that shape and inten- sify disaster. With these theoretical frameworks and our own imperfect experiences in mind, we call for a greater focus on multiple...”
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“...a challenging and uncertain period. We would also like to thank the Editors of HIMALAYA, Marina Welker, Drew Zackary, and the two anonymous reviewers for critical feedback that deepened our reflections and contributed to a better understanding of our own multiple engagements. Financial support for our research in the months prior to the earthquakes was provided by the Fulbright U.S. Student Program and the U.S. Department of Education Fulbright Hays Program, respectively. Austin Lord's post-earthquake research in Nepal has also been supported by a U.S. Department of State Area Studies Foreign Language & Area Studies Fellowship. Galen Murton's research in Nepal was funded by the Social Science Research Council as well as the Department of Geography and the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder. Austin would like to express heartfelt appreciation to his family members in Nepal, who supported us in innumerable ways throughout this entire process, particularly Roop Sagar...”
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“...4. At the time of the earthquake, both authors were U.S. Fulbright Scholars in Nepal, conducting research on infrastructure development, mobility and social change. For more information on our scholarly contributions see Lord (2014; 2016), Murton (2015; 2017), or Murton, Lord & Beazley (2016). 5. More than 300 people lost their lives in the Langtang Valley on April 25th, including 175 Langtangpa. Unfortunately, more than two years after the earthquake, some of the bodies have not yet been recovered from the Langtang avalanche zone. 6. For example, Tamang communities make up only 5.8% of Nepal’s population yet an estimated 34% of total earthquake casualties were Tamang (Magar 2015). See also Thapa (2015). 7. At this point in the ‘Emergency Phase,’ most large NGOs were still establishing logistical supply chains (with the exception of a few with air assets) and mobilizations by the Nepalese state (with the exception of the Nepal Army, which focused on search and rescue and evacuation operations)...”
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“...from the Nepal Earthquake. Savage Minds. June 5, 2015. earthquake> (accessed on November 30, 2016). Holmberg, David H. 1977. Order In Paradox Myth, Ritual And Exchange Among Nepal’s Tamang. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Holmberg, David H. and Kathryn S. March. 2015. Tamsaling and the Toll of the Gorkha Earthquake. Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology website, October 14, 2015. earthquake> (accessed on November 30, 2016). Ingold, Tim. 1993. The Temporality of the Landscape. World Archaeology 25 (2): 152-174. Kargel, J. S., G. J. Leonard, D. H. Shugar, U. K. Haritashya, A. Bevington, E. J.Fielding, and E. Anderson. 2016. Geomorphic and Geologic Controls of Geohazards Induced by Nepal’s 2015 Gorkha Earthquake. Science 351 (6269), aac8353. K.C., Gaurab and Mallika Shakya. 2015. A Disciplinary Earthquake. The Kathmandu...”
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“...Haiti after the Earthquake. American Anthropologist 116 (2): 409-412. Shakya, Mallika. 2015. The Question of Locality in Rupture. Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology website, October 14, 2015. (accessed on November 30, 2016). Sheller, Mimi. 2016. Connected Mobility in a Disconnected World: Contested Infrastructure in Postdisaster Contexts. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 106(2): 330-339. Shneiderman, Sara. 2015. “Dots on the Map:” Anthropological Locations and Responses to Nepal’s Earthquakes. Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology website, October 14, 2015. (accessed on November 30, 2016). Shneiderman, Sara and Mark Turin. 2015. Nepal’s Relief Effort Must Reach the Rural Poor. The Globe and Mail, April 27, 2015. Simpson, Edward. 2013. The Political Biography of an Earthquake: Aftermath and...”