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“...Himalayan Trauma: Administrative Thrombosis and Citizens’ Response
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Austin Lord and Sienna Craig for their review of the article and their many
insightful comments and suggestions. He also would like to express a deep sense of gratitude and respect for
all the volunteers^ doctors, and nurses he had the privilege to work with and for the support both monetary
and spiritual that manifested as a result of social media virtual participant experiences from around the world.
This perspectives is available in HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies:
http:/ / digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol37/iss2/8...”
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“...Himalayan Trauma: Administrative Thrombosis and
Citizens' Response
Robert E. Beazley
In this paper, the author uses excerpts from
social media postings and traditional media
to highlight how various citizen and volunteer
responses to the 2015 earthquake helped fill in
the gaps created by institutional dysfunction.
Further, he shows how these two types of
media played a critical role in facilitating
communication between grassroots aid
initiatives and earthquake affected people and
their families and friends, not only in Kathmandu
but also in neglected mountainous areas as well.
The author uses a personal, reflexive approach
to help situate the distinct experiences of
earthquake affected people including trauma
patients, people with disabilities, and volunteer
aid workers.
Keywords: Nepal, earthquake, trauma, citizens' response, health
care, disaster aid and relief.
Introduction
Sudan Gurung arrived by scooter at the Bir National
Trauma Center on April 25, 2015, carrying a man with
an injured...”
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“...when not conducting social science research at my site in
northern Rasuwa District near the Tibetan border.
Within the first 45 days of the initial earthquake, Nepal
experienced 553 aftershocks of local magnitude greater
than 4.0 on the Richter scale (Adhikari et al. 2015), not to
mention the major aftershocks greater than magnitude
4.0 and the main aftershock of May 12, 2015 (magnitude
7.3) which created a whole new round of destruction and
chaos, especially in rural areas northeast of Kathmandu.
The aftershocks continued and are still occurring presently
in Nepal.1
Like Sudan, I was caught off-guard by the earthquakes,
despite all of the ways that the possibility of natural
disaster always looms large in Nepal. And, like Sudan, after
these events, I found myself swept up in relief efforts,
much of which was facilitated by social media, as well
as implicated in various citizen and volunteer responses
to these tragedies. In this Perspectives article, I describe
how social media and more t...”
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“...experiencing an excess of volunteers
whereas the night shift had minimal coverage. As I began
contacting people, I was surprised how many agreed to
do at least a partial night shift. During my first day, I met
many Nepali volunteers as well as a handful of foreigners.
Most of the foreigners were trekkers on vacation; some
had previous experience in first aid; one was a doctor on
vacation from Sri Lanka.
Social media provided an invaluable platform for people to
communicate with each other and the outside world about
what was happening on the ground during and after the
earthquakes. My own social media posts at the time reflect
the chaos and shock I experienced when I first started working
with 12 We. After facing a particularly challenging experience
on April 28, 2015,1 wrote the following on Facebook:
I was assigned to a nine-year-old girl when I ar-
rived. She had two broken arms, a compound frac-
tured leg, and what they call a ‘ping pong’ fracture
in the top of her head. A huge rock had...”
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“...reached. Soon, the
number of volunteers reached more than 1,000. Some vol-
unteers began organizing similar missions further afield.
These improvisational efforts were particularly salient
as they were based on context-specific information that
was filtering in from patients and refugees arriving from
mountainous areas where communication had been cut off
and where state or large-scale humanitarian organizations’
efforts had neither been focused nor prioritized.
The Role of the Media
Through both social media and conventional news plat-
forms, word spread about compelling stories like Tsering’s,
often to the point where news teams began lining up to
get their crack at a story. Some patients became earth-
quake-injured celebrities. Their stories were reproduced
on different networks. News teams from around the world
began arriving as more images reached the global public.
A Time magazine correspondent pulled me aside to get the
perspective of a volunteer. His hurried demeanor spoke to
the focus...”
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“...fringes of an already
marginalized existence (Lord et al. 2016).
Mobilization in Areas of Social and Institutional Neglect
It was truly impressive to see the worldwide response
to the earthquake. A total of 54 search and rescue (SAR)
teams (2,080 personnel including staff) arrived in Nepal to
help with the response (Shenhar et al. 2016). While I was
volunteering, search and rescue teams from India, Israel,
Japan, and the United Arab Emirates visited the Trauma
Center. And yet, much of the immediate response to the
earthquake centered largely on the Kathmandu Valley.
Within days, however, a second wave of response from
Nepali volunteers emerged, as several groups of talented,
dedicated, and resourceful Nepali citizens began the
process of supplying aid and resources to communities in
earthquake-affected districts across their country.
One example of such mobilization—and its intersections
with the social media as well as diasporic Nepal—came
in the form of the Nepalese American Nurses Association...”
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“...ons
to help address areas of social and institutional neglect
in Rasuwa District where three of us had spent several
months doing ethnographic research (Murton, Lord, and
Beazley 2016). Through our work as Rasuwa Relief, we
pursued a variety of collaborations with various other
grassroots humanitarian initiatives such as the Himalayan
Disaster Relief Volunteer Group5 (a.k.a. “Yellow House”),
Kathmandu Living Labs,6 and the Phulmaya Foundation,7
led by Rajeev Goy al, another colleague from Cornell and
founder of KTK-BELT.8 Most of these connections were
facilitated through Facebook and other social media
networks. We used online crowd-sourcing technologies to
raise funds, reflecting a pattern of self-organization that
has become increasingly common in the wake of disaster
as in everyday life.
While working as Rasuwa Relief, we also became aware of
the many areas that were overlooked by both state and
other volunteer organizations. Connections through social
media helped us map and respond...”
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“...meetings and events...and a
re-arrangement of the relations between domestic
and public space...There is increasing convergence
between transport and communication, ‘mobi-
lizing’ the requirements and characteristics of
co-presence into a new kind of mobility nexus.
Since April 2015, many people have written about the
vital role virtual mobility technologies played in earth-
quake relief efforts (see Busso et al. 2015, Carpenter 2015,
Schorr and Warner 2015). The use of virtual mobility
technologies—social media, smartphones, radios, and
open source mapping—was instrumental in getting the
word out, recruiting volunteers, raising funds, network-
ing, and organizing logistics. The day of the earthquake
Mark Zuckerberg CEO of Facebook activated Safety Check
on Facebook—a way by which individuals in Nepal could
notify friends and family that they were safe. Within
hours, a team of volunteers led by Mark Turin (University
of British Columbia) translated this into Nepali, making the
function many times...”
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“...networks in the Annapurna Conservation Area. His current
research involves an investigation of gendered mobility
and borderland infrastructure in Rasuwa district, Nepal. His
most recent book is Himalayan Mobilities: An Exploration
of the Impact of Expanding Rural Road Networks on Social
and Ecological Systems in the Nepalese Himalaya (Springer,
2017).
The author would like to thank Austin Lord and Sienna Craig for
their review of the article and their many insightful comments
and suggestions. He also would like to express a deep sense of
gratitude and respect for all the volunteers, doctors, and nurses he
had the privilege to work with and for the support both monetary
and spiritual that manifested as a result of social media virtual
participant experiences from around the world.
Endnotes
1. See .
2. Pseudonym.
3. See .
4. See
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“...of
Smartphones as Public Earthquake-Information Tools and
Tools for the Rapid Engagement with Eyewitnesses: A Case
Study of the 2015 Nepal Earthquake Sequence. Seismological
Research Letters 86(6): 1587-1592
Carpenter, Sue. 2015. Rise of the Facebook Crusader: After
the Devastating Earthquake in April, a New Generation of
Aid Workers Emerged in Nepal - Young People Using Social
Media to Help Save Lives and Rebuild the Country. Daily
Mail 15/08/2015. social-media-help-save-lives-
rebuild-country.html> (Accessed on 1 October 2016).
Craig, Sienna. 2015. ‘Slow’ Medicine in Fast Times. Savage
Minds, 23/06/2015. (Accessed on 24 June 2016).
D’Andrea, Wendy, Lou Bergholz, Andrea Fortunato,
and Joseph Spinazzola. 2013. Play to the Whistle: A
Pilot Investigation of a...”
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“...Lions Roar. 2015. How Buddhists are Helping after the
Earthquake. Lions Roar, 25/05/2015. (Accessed on 3 September 2015).
Lord, Austin, Bandita Sijapati, Jeevan Biniya, Obindra
Chand, and Tracey Ghale. 2016. Disaster, Disability, &
Difference: A Study of the Challenges Faced by Persons with
Disabilities in Post-Earthquake Nepal. Kathmandu: Social
Science Baha and the United Nations Development Program.
Maharjan, Uttam. 2015. Psychological Counseling for
Quake Victims. The Rising Nepal, 21/05/2015. (Accessed on 3 September 2016).
Maru, Duncan, Kalaunee, S. P., and Shanta Bahadur
Shrestha. 2016. Building Health Care Systems In Post-
Earthquake, Post-Constitution Nepal. Heath Affairs,
04/04/2016.
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