Eight-year-old Zogyal Gale, who managed to climb a tree to escape the devastating floods in Nepal, was reunited with his mother today after she had begun to fear that her two sons had been killed at their school.
Yesterday, Thursday, the 8-year-old was evacuated by helicopter from the devastated Rasuwa region. He had a broken leg and scrapes on his face. At the same time, his 28-year-old mother was going from one shelter to another, searching for her two missing children.
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“Even at the fourth location, I didn’t find my children’s names on the list—they weren’t there,” Mati Maya Tamang told Reuters. “I had started to believe that my two children were no longer alive,” she continued, explaining that she had been crying nonstop.
According to the most recent tally, at least 580 people have been killed and 2,500 are missing due to the floods in Nepal and Tibet.
SEE ALSO: Tragedy in Nepal: At least 469 dead in landslide; 555 tourists rescued
The 28-year-old mother found the phone of Shahana Bazracharia, a Reuters reporter, who met Zoya Gale at a small hospital in Nuwakot. Bazracharia went to that hospital with a Reuters team after learning that a young boy had been taken there and the authorities did not know where his family was. Before he was transferred to a hospital in Kathmandu, the journalist said the 8-year-old agreed to be filmed in the hope of reuniting with his family.
Bazracharia left her phone number at the hospital, and the mother contacted her a few hours later. When the reporter assured her that it was indeed her son, the 28-year-old woman could not believe her ears. Earlier, she had located Zogial’s younger brother, who was still alive.
On Wednesday morning, the two brothers took the school bus to go to school when the tragedy struck. Fearing the worst, the mother tried to reach the school, but the destruction at that particular spot was total. “You couldn’t tell where the school was, where the market was… All you could see was water, rocks, and mud everywhere.”
When the Reuters team met the 8-year-old boy at the hospital in Nouakot, no one knew where his family was. The child was clutching two banknotes that police officers had given him to persuade him to follow them to the hospital. He recounted that everything went dark when the floods hit the school and that he and a friend climbed a tree and were saved. When the reporter asked him if he was afraid, he shook his head no.
Today, his mother arrived at the hospital in Kathmandu where the 8-year-old had been taken. Relieved, she told Reuters that Zogyal had “been a little rascal since he was little, so this isn’t his first fracture.”
His father, who is in Japan working in construction, is expected to arrive in Nepal’s capital in the coming hours.
Source: KYPE
