Nepal’s quake-hit Tibetan nuns rebuild homes

CHAKHAM, Nepal: It is the first time Nawang Tsultrim has harboured any sense of hope in a year.

“They will begin to build my house tomorrow,” she says cheerfully, picking through a pile of rubble that was once her home: a modest one-room building in the Bakhang Buddhist Nunnery in northeastern Nepal, near the border with Tibet.

A devastating Nepal earthquake a year ago levelled much of the place. Only a prayer hall, where Buddhist rituals and communal meditation take place, still stands, criss-crossed with cracks.

The nunnery, perching on a mountainside at 3,000 metres above sea level, is home to 212 Tibetan nuns who crossed the Himalayan border to live away from Chinese rule.

Many Tibetan refugees also use it as a temporary resting place before heading to India.

For weeks after the quake, all the surviving nuns were crammed into one shelter.

“It was an extremely difficult situation,” said Tsechu Dolma, founder and director of the nonprofit Mountain Resiliency Project in Kathmandu.

She came to Bakhang just a few days after the earthquake.

“Everybody was crying. They were mourning a nun who was killed by the quake.

And they had no idea how to get their life back again,” she said. As the nuns do not have residency rights or identity cards in Nepal - like many other Tibetan migrants in the country - they are effectively illegal immigrants.

“They are stateless and invisible,” said Dolma. Tibetan migrants have few employment prospects beyond low-pay jobs like waitressing and manual labour, she said.