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Climbed trees to escape floods, airlifted later: How 8-year-old boy was reunited with mother in Nepal
A day earlier, eight-year-old Zoyal Ghale had been airlifted out of the flood-affected northern district of Rasuwa with a broken leg and injuries to his face.
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An eight-year-old boy, who fled into a forest and climbed trees to survive Nepal's deadly floods, was reunited with his mother on Friday. She had feared that both he and his brother had died after being trapped at their school.
A day earlier, eight-year-old Zoyal Ghale had been airlifted out of the flood-affected northern district of Rasuwa with a broken leg and injuries to his face. His 28-year-old mother, Matti Maya Tamang, had meanwhile been searching shelters and collection centres for her two missing sons. Follow latest updates related to Nepal floods here.
‘Could see everything being swept away’
The two boys had left for school on Wednesday morning in the school vehicle. Tamang was at home weaving when she suddenly heard a sound that reminded her of an earthquake.
The disaster began after the lower section of a glacier near the Langtang Lirung mountain peak collapsed on Wednesday and crashed into the valley below. The ice and rocks then caused a huge landslide.
"I could see everything was being swept away," Tamang said. "I thought my children were getting swept away, too."
She set off towards their school, which usually took 15 to 20 minutes to reach by car. But the area had changed so much that she struggled to recognise it. The school itself had been destroyed.
"You could not understand where the school was, where the market was," she said. "There was only water, stones and mud everywhere.
How the boy was found
At least 17,000 children had been affected by the floods in Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading districts, north of Kathmandu, according to the UN children's agency, UNICEF.
"At the fourth place too, my children's names were not on the list, and they were not there," Tamang told news agency Reuters. "I had come to accept that both my children were no more. All I could do was weep. I couldn’t hold myself together at all."
After several searches failed to locate her sons, Tamang got the phone number of a Reuters journalist on Thursday. The journalist had met Ghale a few hours earlier at a hospital in the neighbouring Nuwakot district.
The journalist spoke to Ghale before he was flown elsewhere for further treatment. She said the boy agreed to be filmed so that his family could be located. She left her phone number at the hospital, and Tamang contacted her a few hours later.
When the journalist told her that Ghale was alive and had been taken to Kathmandu, Tamang said she could hardly believe the news.
By then, Tamang had also found her younger son alive.
Boy finally meets mother
On Friday, Tamang made her way to the Kathmandu hospital where Ghale had been taken, about a two-hour drive from their home.
After spending days looking for him, Tamang stood quietly by her son's hospital bed. Ghale's father, who works as a construction labourer in Japan, was also travelling to meet them, Tamang said.
“Oh, he is always a mischievous kid,” she said. “This is not his first broken bone.”
With inputs from Reuters
