Rivers

I took this shot of the Mai river (also known by some other names) which (perhaps I can be corrected on this) is near Maidhar, which is just outside of Damak. I'm including this for a couple of reasons. The first is that it is of historical importance to the community here. In the early 1990s, when the Lhotsampa (a.k.a. the Bhutanese folks who are in the camps) left Bhutan, they first settled next to this river. That ended up being a humanitarian nightmare, according to the refugees I've talked to who remember this time. The short of it is that tens of thousands of people ended up here living in close quarters with no food and sanitation, and lots of people got dysentary (among other things) and died. After this situation came to the attention of the Nepali government and the UN, they began building the seven refugee camps that are here around the Damak.

The other reason I included it is because it's rather flooded here right now. This morning I left in a truck with one of the drivers to go to a camp that's a couple of rivers away from Damak. The driver, looking remarkably rested for a man who has a 24 day old baby at home, and I made conversation in a mix of English and Hindi, and set out on our way. We then reached a river that I guess they usually drive through when it is not a river. We stopped and the driver said we'd wait and see if anyone else could drive through it. We watched as 5 guys picked up a motorcycle and walked through, and as a huge truck carrying logs made it through. At this point a UN vehicle drove up, and stopped, and I had a nice chat with a Canadian woman who had just been posted here to do resettlement work. So then all of us watched as more people picked their way through the thigh-high water, and then the drivers decided that driving through the river was a bad idea, and so we drove back.