Miscellaneous
Holding up more than half the sky
Twenty-seven-year old Durga Laxmi Maharjan of Khokana was working in the fields when she felt the earth begin to shake.Nitya Pandey
“As soon as the tremors stopped, I rushed home, only to find a pile of rubble where our house used to be. But despite that, I was overjoyed to see my two children out in the open, unscathed,” says Maharjan, who is currently living with her family in a makeshift camp in Khokana.
The Great Quake inflicted heavy damage in Khokana, a village on the outskirts of Lalitpur. More than 600 houses have collapsed and nine people were buried alive, turning the area into a ghost of its former self.
And it has been the women, like Durga Laxmi and others in this village, who have become their families’ bedrock in this time of extreme crisis.
“My family members are my biggest concern at the moment,” says Hira Devi Maharjan, 45, who has been spending most of her time after the quake carrying water in large copper gagris from a small tap half-an-hour away from her house. Water scarcity has become an acute
problem in Khokana now, but Hira Devi and the other women in the village would rather make the arduous walk to fetch water for their families than wait around for infrastructure-reconstruction work to start in their village.
That it’s the women who have been showcasing remarkable courage and resilience in the days and weeks following the Great Quake probably has to do with the fact that they are so focused on the other members in their family.
Mangal Maya Dangol of Khokana, who is in her late sixties, has lived through other earthquakes in the past. When asked to choose the scariest among them, she says that it’s unquestionably the one that hit the country on April 25. And the way she gauges how afraid she was is not correlated at all with the Richter scale.
“This one was the worst because this time it was my little grandson who was at risk,” she says. “It was dreadful.”
Dangol was alone at home looking after her grandson while the rest of the family were out working in the fields when the big one hit. The old lady picked up the toddler and ran out of the house as soon as the initial tremors began and she was able to save herself and the child by a few lucky seconds. “Our house collapsed right before my eyes. We barely managed to escape,” she says, the wrinkles on her forehead deepening with the fear that the memory evokes.
When I talk to women about the earthquake, I have noticed that many of them tend to talk about how worried they are about their babies, husbands and other family members before moving on to fears about property damage and so on. Perhaps it is that sense of responsibility to family that has been propelling them to try their best to restore some normalcy into a life that had spiralled into a whirlwind of chaos and terror. And it is rather remarkable how these women have taken the reins of their broken households in these dire times.
Karuna Kunwar, a psychologist, attributes this quality to the kind of upbringing that women in non-Western societies receive from a very early age. According to her, women have more adaptive capacities, patience and tolerance in comparison to their male counterparts, which help them cope better with difficult situations.
“Men, on the contrary, are always used to being in power. Society views them as the providers and protectors of the family. But in desperate times like these, when things spiral out of their control, they feel completely powerless and stressed out,” says Kunwar, who has been conducting counselling sessions for earthquake victims in Dolakha, one of the epicentres of the May 12 quake.
The way that 32-year-old Krishna Shobha Maharjan of Khokana has taken charge of things shows there is quite a bit of truth to Kunwar’s claim.
Krishna Shobha was already back to working in the fields a few days after the earthquake while her husband, a sculptor, still seems to be in a state of shock. His wife, in the meantime, is busy cooking, washing and looking after the household in the same manner that she used to when things were better. “I had planted some crops last month. But after the earthquake, people camped out here in the fields and trampled over the seeds and saplings. I am trying to cultivate new crops so that my family does not starve,” she says, as she wipes beads of sweat from her brows.
Dr Renu Rajbhandari, Chairperson of the National Alliance of Women Human Rights Defenders, who has been working with female victims in severely affected districts like Rasuwa, Dhading, Nuwakot, Kavre and Kathmandu, says that she has been amazed by the resilience shown by women. She cites the example of a woman who had been looking after her entire family despite being badly shaken up after the 7.3 magnitude aftershock that struck 16 days after the initial shock.
“I have worked with women who have been victims of several kinds of disasters and every single time, I find that the women manage to take control. I believe it is their nature to love and nurture that makes them so strong in the hour of difficulty,” she says.