Nepalis in New York Improvise a Relief Effort for Earthquake Victims
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Version 0 of 1. The day after the earthquake in Nepal, Lila Lamini, who lives in Woodside, Queens, gathered a dozen of her friends, all of them fellow domestic workers in New York and all from the same rural area of Nepal. The quake had destroyed their villages, blocked access to the region, and killed and injured residents. “My friends said, ‘I have no idea what to do,’ ” she recalled. “I said: ‘Come on, guys. Everybody, think.’ ” The women started making calls — to anyone who might have some influence in their homeland or might know of someone who did. A Nepali insurance agent Ms. Lamini knew in New Jersey soon put her in touch with a well-connected politician in Kathmandu who, within an hour of their phone conversation, had dispatched two helicopters to the women’s villages in the Sindhupalchok region to deliver medical supplies and evacuate the wounded. Ms. Lamini, 41, was glad for one thing: “I helped my country,” she said. Diasporas have always been important sources of financial aid and other support for home countries, especially in times of crises like natural disasters and war. With the rapid spread of cellphones, social media and electronic banking, diasporas have become more influential than ever in their ability to play a role in humanitarian relief, using real-time information to quickly identify needs and deploy money, goods and volunteers. This has been particularly true among Nepalis in New York, a small but fast-growing population, who, despite an absence of well-established community institutions, have marshaled tremendous support in response to the April 25 earthquake, often by employing readily available technological tools. Most Nepalis here have sidestepped the major international humanitarian organizations, which many view as slow or inefficient. Nearly all have avoided the Nepali government, calling it ineffective and corrupt. They have instead sent money and goods to their homeland through grass-roots Nepali groups, or directly to relatives and friends. The result has been an energetic yet wildly improvised and scattershot response to the crisis. From donation jars in Nepali restaurants to campaigns on social media and crowdfunding sites like Facebook and Indiegogo, Nepali businesses, groups and individuals in the New York metropolitan region have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations and solicited tons of used clothing, medical equipment, food, tents and other emergency supplies. The earthquake left over 7,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands homeless. These efforts have tightened bonds within the diaspora, building fledgling community groups and further strengthening the immigrants’ ties to Nepal, community members say. “Nepalese people are expecting a lot from the diaspora, and they’re looking to the United States,” said Kishor Panthi, 32, founder and editor in chief of Khasokhas Weekly, a Nepali newspaper published in New York. “It’s a huge test of diasporic organizations.” The foreign-born Nepali population in the United States has surged in the past two decades, propelled in part by a decade-long civil war between Maoist parties and the government that ended in 2006. There are now about 74,700 Nepalis, up from about 2,400 in 1990, according to the latest estimates by the Census Bureau. During that same period, the city saw a similarly significant growth in the Nepali immigrant population, to about 6,500 from less than 300, with the largest enclaves in the Queens neighborhoods of Corona, Elmhurst, Jackson Heights, Ridgewood, Sunnyside and Woodside, as well as in Midwood in Brooklyn. Community leaders say the population is largely working- and middle-class without the economic clout of some other Asian diasporas. Because the community is relatively new and still fairly small, its institutions — the social, religious and business groups — are generally not well developed, leaders say. Still, when news of the earthquake arrived in New York, reaction in the diaspora was immediate, if ad hoc, the emergency made all the more visceral by the sound of anguished appeals by relatives and friends reaching out by cellphone and social networks. One afternoon last week, Mingma T. Sherpa, 28, was behind the counter of his cellphone shop in Elmhurst, which had become a major donation center. Nine years ago, he and two other partners founded Heartbeat, a nonprofit group to help street children in Nepal. After the earthquake, they repurposed the group as a disaster relief service, its headquarters in the shop, and their friends took time off from their other responsibilities as Uber drivers, restaurant workers and graduate students to help. They posted an appeal for clothes on their Facebook page and were inundated with donations from Nepalis and non-Nepalis alike: 170 boxes’ worth in the first day. Hearing there was a greater need for medicine, first aid supplies and food, they packed all the clothes away in the store’s cellar and a storage locker and issued a new appeal. Just as quickly, people began showing up at their shop to donate crates of over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, first aid equipment, water purification systems, protein bars and other items. As of Monday, they had shipped nearly 100 boxes of emergency supplies. A collaborator at the airport in Kathmandu was planning to expedite the goods on their arrival, doing an end run around the government bureaucracy and into the hands of Mr. Sherpa’s partner, who, with the help of a growing network of volunteers, intended to transport the goods into the Nepali hinterlands. “Connections,” Mr. Sherpa said with a sly smile. Even as he spoke, one of his colleagues was reporting new messages posted on their Facebook page and sent via text message: Survivors in Bakhtapur district, in the eastern Kathmandu valley, needed medicine and food; a donor in New Jersey had 40 boxes of medical supplies for pickup. A minivan pulled up and two Nepali men from Providence, R.I., jumped out. They had six boxes, their contents neatly listed on the outside: blankets, flashlights, raincoats, nutrition bars, masks, hand sanitizers and bandages. On each box was taped a printed message: “For our Nepal. Love from Nepalese in Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.A.” More than 20 families in Providence had contributed money for the packages, said Sunil Gurung, 28, a business analyst who had driven down with his friend, Amit Kapri, 29, a statistical software programmer. They had learned about Heartbeat through Facebook. “A lot of us thought we’d go through the big organizations,” Mr. Gurung said. “But we thought it would be more effective and efficient to deal with the people directly on the ground.” With the mainstream humanitarian groups, he explained, “I don’t know if my $100 will be worth $5 by the end of the day.” In recent days, Western aid organizations and governments complained that Nepali bureaucratic procedures were holding up relief supplies at the Kathmandu airport. Representatives of Heartbeat have sent a request through their social media networks that travelers bound for Nepal consider using part of their luggage allotment to carry relief supplies. Another group of young Nepalis in New York has also emerged as a leading force in the local response. In the hours after the quake, members of the New York Nepalese Football Club, a five-year-old group focused on soccer, became an engine of activism. On April 26, the day after the earthquake, members of the club went door to door in Jackson Heights and surrounding neighborhoods seeking donations. They raised nearly $23,000 the first day, said Pralay Rajbhandari, 30, vice captain of the team and a master’s student in computer science at Touro College. They were also co-organizers of a large vigil in Times Square on Friday. The group is wiring a portion of the money to the club’s president in Kathmandu — he was visiting Nepal at the time of the earthquake — and is using the rest to buy and ship emergency supplies like nutrition bars and water purification sets, Mr. Rajbhandari said. The club’s president, aided by a growing network of volunteers, plans to distribute supplies personally to hard-hit rural areas. “I think people underestimate the informal economy and informal networks,” said Irene Jor, the New York organizer for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which works closely with Adhikaar, a Nepali advocacy and services group in Woodside that had raised more than $35,000 by Monday on Indiegogo Life. “But maybe ‘informal’ is the wrong word,” she continued, “because maybe if it can respond so quickly and effect so much change on the ground, there’s nothing informal about it.” As these grass-roots efforts have flourished, many members of the community said they would try to sidestep the government in an effort to avoid bureaucratic red tape, graft and other obstacles. “So many people don’t trust the Nepalese government,” said Bijaya Poudel, 40, chief editor of Vishwa Sandesh, a weekly Nepali newspaper published in New York, and of its online iteration, Vishwanews.com. “That is the truth.” On Monday, the government announced that it had set up a bank account for donations, news that was widely greeted with derision. In recent days, strands of the New York-area diaspora began to braid themselves around a campaign to press for a special temporary immigration status sometimes granted to foreigners who are unable to return safely to their home countries because of armed conflict or natural disasters. The special status would protect undocumented Nepalis in the United States from deportation and allow them to remain temporarily and work. After pursuing their own campaigns for several days, several Nepali groups decided to form a national coalition and begin a campaign for the protection, said Luna Ranjit, co-founder and executive director of Adhikaar. The movement has drawn on the experiences of other diasporas, including the lobbying for temporary protected status for Filipino immigrants after the 2013 typhoon, and for Haitian immigrants after the earthquake in 2010. “This is for Nepal,” said Dilli Raj Bhatta, a Nepali lawyer in New York, who is participating in the coalition. “If we cannot come together in a time like this, I don’t think we’ll ever come together in the future.” |