@elijahwolfson
IT WAS A MIRACLE, the Nepalis say, that the 2015 Gorkha earthquake, which registered a magnitude of 7.8 and shook their Kathmandu Valley onto the world stage, happened on a Saturday morning. Throughout rural Nepal, children were in their home villages instead of away in the schoolhouses, and most everyone was out in the fields planting, picking, cooking and playing. When the ground rumbled on April 25, the people swayed, fell to their knees in the dirt and felt their hearts race as they looked out across the valleys and saw homes topple. When the shaking stopped, they ran through the switchbacks carved into the terraced hills to their stone-and-mud homes, most constructed at great cost and with their own hands over many years, to assess the damage.
Over 600,000 houses crumbled that day, according to the Ministry of Home Affairs (some 300,000 more were partially damaged)—but only around 9,000 people died; consider that the death toll of Haiti’s 2010 quake is thought to be well above 100,000. The people of Nepal counted their blessings and resigned themselves to making a new life.