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Page 6
“...embassies and families around the world
trying to locate missing people in the Langtang area.
Meanwhile, most of the 488 survivors from the Langtang
community shifted to a camp for Internally Displaced
Persons (iDPs) that had been established at the Phuntsok
Choeling Monastery near Swayambhunath in Kathmandu.
Austin and others made several visits to the camp to
provide relief materials and to talk with community
members. After less than 48 hours in Kathmandu, Austin,
grew frustrated with the uneven impacts and optics of the
disaster (cf. Shneiderman & Turin 2015; Nelson 2015) and
wrote the following statement on social media:
To be clear: Kathmandu is not just a pile of rubble.
Don’t believe the hype. Without dismissing the very
real needs of some people, the damage is remark-
ably, fortunately, and unexpectedly limited com-
pared with the possibilities and most importantly
with other parts of Nepal. I say this because most
current international media continues to reinforce
longstanding spatial...”
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Page 7
“...aware of
legacies of social and spatial exclusion experienced by
Tamang populations in Rasuwa who had been subject to
centuries of marginalization, corvee labor, and the codified
caste-based discrimination of the muluki ain (Holmberg
1977; Campbell 2013). The earthquake hit Tamang com-
munities across northern-Nepal particularly hard (Magar
2015),6 compounding everyday vulnerabilities, especially
in Rasuwa, where 82% of the district population identi-
fies as Tamang (Ghale 2015). The uneven impacts of the
earthquakes on Tamang populations led some to relocate
the event around a ‘Tamang epicenter’ (Magar 2015) or to
interpret the disaster as a ‘Tamsaling Tragedy’ (Holmberg
& March 2015). In the immediate wake of the earthquake,
Tamang communities in Rasuwa and ethnic minorities
(janajatis) in other regions remained heavily underserved
and overshadowed by greater attention to other more
visible and politically-connected areas.
As we worked on determining the contours of the gaps
in Rasuwa...”
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Page 8
“...first public 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...”
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Page 15
“...from Yale
University and a B.A. in Economics from Dartmouth College.
A portfolio of his visual work focused on Nepal can be found
at .
Galen Murton is an Assistant Professor in the Department
of Integrated Science and Technology at James Madison
University with teaching responsibilities in the Geographic
Sciences Program. He completed his PhD in the Department
of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder (2017).
His dissertation examined the social and geopolitical
impacts of infrastructure projects in High Asia with a focus
on road developments between China and Nepal. His next
project, Road Diplomacy: China in South Asia, is supported
by a Marie S. Curie Action Individual Fellowship based at
Ludwig Maximilian University Munich in 2018-19.
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:...”
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