'I came to find my son's body': Families search for loved ones after Nepal floods

CHITWAN, Nepal — “I came here hoping to find my 13-year-old son’s body.”

Sagiar Alam spoke these words as he fought back tears while standing outside a temporary morgue set up in Bharatpur in Chitwan, Nepal, on Monday morning.

Chitwan is about 180 kilometers (111.8 miles) from the Rasuwa District in the northern province of Bagmati, where the devastating floods first struck. The Trishuli River in Rasuwa flows into the Narayani River, and hundreds of bodies have been recovered in the area.

But since the region has no facilities capable of storing or handling that many bodies, Nepalese authorities have turned part of the Chitwan Expo Center in Bharatpur into a temporary morgue.

Masks were handed out at the site to guard against possible infectious diseases, while people hoping to find the bodies of missing family members waited in line outside the center.

Alam was among them. His son had gone with his uncle to Rasuwa to help support the family, and Alam has not been able to contact him since the floods.

He spent five days searching for his son in Chitwan before he was told that a body believed to be his son’s had been found. He is now waiting for the results of a DNA test.

“I lost five family members in the floods, including my son,” Alam said. “I couldn’t protect [him] because I wasn't there. I can’t believe this.” 

Other families have traveled across the country in search of their loved ones’ bodies, unsure where they might be found.

“I came here looking for my second-oldest brother and nephew,” Anil Magar said. “I’ve already checked every hospital in Kathmandu. My parents told me to try Chitwan and other cities too, so I’ve been checking one area after another.”

Sandhya Karki, a young woman searching for her father, was doing the same.

“I came to Bharatpur while other family members went to Kathmandu [to look for my father],” she said. “I have to find [him] somehow, but I don’t know how.”

Before bodies are brought to the temporary morgue, they are disinfected at Bharatpur Hospital.

At the hospital on Monday, medical workers wearing protective suits handled a pile of bodies in a makeshift designated area beneath a tent. Some were so badly damaged that they were unrecognizable.

“A total of 272 bodies have been brought here as of last night,” a hospital worker said. “Of those, 160 were men, 60 were women and the rest were difficult to identify because only body parts such as hands or legs remained.

“We’re using ice and refrigeration facilities to keep the bodies from decomposing, but we don’t have anywhere near enough [resources].” 

In Nepal, where Hinduism and Buddhism are the predominant religions, burying the dead is an uncommon practice. But with the sweltering temperatures coinciding with the rainy season, authorities have been collecting the minimum DNA samples needed, then burying bodies that remain unidentified or have not been claimed en masse — mainly due to concerns about their decomposition and resulting spread of infectious diseases.

In Chitwan, the bodies are being buried in the Devghat forest.

Armed police officers have restricted access to the area, about a 10-minute drive from Bharatpur Hospital, and only allowed people to enter part of the site where bodies were buried on the condition that they do not take any photographs.

In the forest, workers dug large pits to bury the victims, with each one containing multiple bodies, and placed numbered markers on the ground above the graves.

“We have buried about 203 bodies as of today, and another 50 to 60 still need to be buried,” a police officer overseeing the site said. 

The death toll from the floods that struck Nepal on Wednesday had risen to 903 as of 9 a.m. on Monday, according to Nepalese authorities. The number of people missing stood at 4,247, up more than 1,600 from the previous day.

BY BYUN MIN-CHUL [[email protected]]