Expat community wait to hear news from Nepal

After the earthquake hit Nepal, Prem Raja Mahat spent a sleepless night at his home in the eastern US city of Baltimore, trying again and again to reach his son, who was visiting friends and family back in Mahat’s home country.

“My wife was crying, crying so much: ‘My son is not here, keep calling, keep calling.’ All night I called, but I could not get through,” said Mahat. “I could not work. I could not sleep. Everyone felt so bad.”

Power outages and communications problems have made life agonising for the nearly 6m Nepalese who live abroad — or about 22% of the population. They try desperately to reach loved ones through mobile phones and global messaging apps, only to be met with silence or fleeting connections. They are forced to wait for word to slowly trickle out of the impoverished country of 28m whose communications have been shaken back to a different era.

The lucky ones received a quick call or text or an early posting on Facebook. But even they have had plenty of time to wait and wonder, as they viewed the devastation on TV and social media, how their loved ones were holding up, what they needed, and when they might hear from them again.

Mahat is known to millions in Nepal as the ‘King of Folk Music’, though he has run restaurants in Baltimore for years. He said last night his son finally managed to reach him after he borrowed a charged phone.

“He is in a tent, staying outside of the home, under the skies,” Mahat said. “They are still not feeling safe because the earth is quaking” from aftershocks.

Access to electricity was usually the difference between whether separated family members were able to reach each other. People in Nepal relied on cars, solar sources, and machines that save up energy for intermittent blackouts to charge up phones or sometimes get online, according to interviews with relatives outside the country.

Landlines and most mobile phones were not working in lots of places, Mahat said, but when a power source was found, his son told him that people shared their charged phones, passing them around so everyone can try to contact people outside the country and tell them they are OK.

Two days after the disaster, rescue workers were still trying to navigate landslides and reach small mountain villages, where aid groups suggested the damage could be terrible.

These expats tried everything they could think of to connect — phone calls, text messages, social media apps, friends of friends in those parts of Nepal less harder hit by the quake and so with better communications.