Survivors Recount Terror as Nepal Floods Devastate Migrant Workers

Arman Ansari, 34, was building a bed in a hotel in northern Nepal when the floods swept him away. He has been missing since [Jyoti Yadav/Al Jazeera] Bettiah, India – Neyaz Miya was adjusting a kitchen handle. Mehadi Hassan was fixing a bracket for a bed. They were at different construction sites – Miya in a half-constructed home, a little higher up the hill, while Hassan was on the ground floor of Ganesh Hotel, closer to the Trishuli River that flowed through Syafrubesi, a bustling market town near the Nepal-Tibet border, now wiped off the map by the August 26 flash floods.

More than 1,200 bodies have been recovered since then, at least 4,000 people remain missing, and more than 13,000 have been rescued. “First came the terrifying loud sound. Then the ground trembled, and dark clouds descended upon us,” recalls 34-year-old Miya, who ran further up the hill with his phone and slippers that morning, five or six others running alongside him. Hassan, lower on the slope, did not wait to reach for his slippers or his phone. He just ran, climbing a narrow, stair-like path, up the hill, stopping only when he reached roughly 60 metres (200ft) above the road.

At some point, Miya and Hassan found each other. Around them were 60 to 70 other survivors who had also gathered high up on the hill. A decade earlier, Miya had arrived in Syafrubesi as a carpenter. Three years later, he brought Hassan with him – both men from Bihar’s Bettiah district. Over the years, they built the town’s interiors – sofas, beds, almirahs, and kitchens for hotels and homes. On that Wednesday morning, they watched all of that washed away. The multi-storey hotels where they had worked – Red Panda, Garden Hotel, Buddha Hotel, Sunrise Hotel – were all swallowed by the flood.

“The town was gone in a blink,” Miya recounts, now sitting in his home in Turhapatti village of Bihar, India, just across the Nepal border. “There were only three kinds of people who survived that day: Those who were out of town, those who were at work and managed to run, and those who lived a little higher up the hill.” Based on what he witnessed, Miya says only a few hundred people in Syafrubesi, a town that had a population of 2,271 in the 2011 census, likely survived. Miya and Hasan are among them. Three of their close friends and colleagues, also migrant workers from Bihar, are not.

When the floods reached Syafrubesi, the men were already at work: Their shifts began at seven in the morning. “To start at seven, we would wake up at four or five,” Miya recalls. They would leave with empty stomachs and were fed tea with doughnuts or biscuits at the construction site by building owners. Their first break came at 11am, when they returned to the rented one-room space (3,500 Nepali rupees or $23 a month) that housed five to seven migrants at a time.

On the morning of August 26, they left for work alongside 34-year-old Arman Ansari, 20-year-old Samir Ansari, and 52-year-old Mukhtar Ansari, all migrants from Miya’s Turhapatti village. In the rented room, two teenage boys, Arman’s 14-year-old son, Salman Alam, and his friend Shibu Alam, 17, remained asleep. They had come a month earlier to visit the hills. “My father had cooked meat bhaat (rice with meat),” Salman recounts. He was waiting for his father to return at 11am so they could eat together.

Arman, his father, was working beside Hassan on the ground floor, pasting sunmica onto the same bed. Samir and Mukhtar were on the top floor of the Full Moon Hotel. When Hassan ran out of the under-construction building and up the hill, he believed Arman was behind him. But by the time Hassan and Miya met higher up, there was no sign of the other three: Arman, Samir and Mukhtar. Miya and Hassan found the boys, Salman and Shibu, terrified, on the hill.

The flood, which came with a high speed, took half an hour to recede. Soon, helicopters started hovering above them, airlifting the critically injured. The four of them – Miya, Hassan and the boys – walked down the hill on foot to search for the three missing in the debris. They found nothing but sludge. Miya’s furniture-cutting tools and machines, worth 80,000 Nepali rupees ($530), were buried in the debris.

When they got back to their room, perched high on a slope, they found that it had survived. But the army had taken charge, and soldiers herded survivors away from tenements near the river. They eventually made their way back to their villages in India via Kathmandu and Birgunj after a harrowing journey.

Turhapatti is among thousands of villages tucked along the 1,715km (1,066-mile) stretch of the India-Nepal border, where generations have crossed back and forth in search of work. The two countries share an open border, driven by economic realities where lower wages in India push workers to seek higher earnings in Nepal.

Families of the missing workers, such as Arman Ansari, Mukhtar Ansari, and Samir Ansari, now face profound grief and financial uncertainty as they search for news and mourn their loved ones.