I have mentioned previously that my recent time away from Nepalgunj coincided with the worst flooding in the region’s memorable history. Nepalgunj is located in Banke District. Banke and its neighbor Bardiya District were hit by serious floods for the second year in a row. In the villages thousands of people were displaced from their homes as entire villages were inundated. While the lucky ones were able to return to their homes after two weeks when the waters had receded, many of those thousands returned to find their homes completely destroyed.

In Nepalgunj most of the buildings survived the waters, but daily life did not. For 11 days all the roads in the city were turned to rivers and all the shops closed. Residents spent 11 days without electricity, running water or any fresh produce. The family whose house I live in ate plain rice for every meal after they had used all the vegetables and eggs in their cupboards.

My return to Nepalgunj was about 2 full weeks after the first days of the flooding. I arrived to find the waters receding and life slowly starting to return to normal. When I stepped of my bus from Kathmandu about half of the cities shops had reopened, and the major streets only had puddles of water left. Left behind by the flood were piles of refuse, seriously eroded roads, pockets of mud and ten to twelve daily blackouts of various lengths (As if on cue the very moment I finished that last sentence we just lost power. Nepal has made me appreciate laptop batteries a lot more than I used to.) Also left behind was one more worry in people’s lives. Nepalgunj had not experienced serious flooding in the past few decades before last year. There are always puddles and mud from the monsoons, but nothing so large enough to shut the city down for the better part of two weeks. Now, with two years of serious floods in succession and no government policy developing to prevent future disasters, Nepalgunj has to face the fact that this was not an isolated incident. The city has to expect that this type of flooding will occur again in the future. In fact there is still the threat that the waters might be back in the next month as the monsoon reaches its peak in mid-August.

I quickly learned that these fears were not overstated as my second day back a heavy rain left my house surrounded by water. To get out from the house I had to wade through knee high water. On my way back home from work in the evening a school of minnows escorted me much of the way home, rather surreal. This one serious rainfall had not flooded the main roads through Nepalgunj, but it did succeed in leaving two feet of water to cover every side street in the city. Two feet of water is not enough to prevent people from going to work or opening their shops, but it has greatly increased the risk of disease for the city’s residents. Even this small amount of water wreaks havoc on the cities hygiene and sanitation efforts (Nepalgunj was not exactly a clean city to start with) and has made the entire city a breeding ground for mosquitoes and other disease carriers.

Urban residents have fared much better than their counterparts in the rural villages where houses made of mud walls and thatched roofs could not stand up to the waters as well as the concrete and cement of the city. In some villages located near to the rivers residents are still living in schools and other public buildings more than three weeks after being forced from their homes. Despite all of the suffering of thousands of people the government has not made any moves to work on a flood prevention policy. In fact they have not even offered to put in place a faster or more effective flood relief strategy (government relief was sufficient once it arrived, but it did not arrive for a few days after the flooding really started.) In fact all the government of Nepal has really said in regards to the flood and its causes is that India is largely to blame because they mismanaged the water running through their dams. Interestingly enough I recently heard on CNN that according to Indian officials the floods in India could be traced to mismanagement of water at dams…in Nepal. So who is right? Who is the culprit? I guess the only answer I have is another question; does it really matter?

Not to the thousands of people who lost their homes it doesn’t. What matters is what will be done to protect them from a similar tragedy next year.