Nepal flood survivors find refuge at monastery as thousands remain missing

Bhujung Tamang was in his kitchen when he heard it—a sound like the world splitting open. Within seconds, his home in Timure, a village perched near the Nepal-Tibet border, was gone. He grabbed his wife and two daughters and ran for the jungle with nothing but the clothes on their backs. No shoes. No money. No plan beyond escape. "We ran. That's why we are alive," he told reporters two days after a helicopter pulled his family from what remained of their village.

What destroyed Timure and surrounding communities in late August was a piece of the Himalayas itself. A glacier broke apart and crashed into the river below, unleashing a wall of water that moved so fast that Tamang believes three-quarters of his village's population was killed. His neighbors were buried in mud and landslides. He and his family spent one night in the jungle without food before rescue came.

Now nearly 3,000 people are missing across the affected region. The exact death toll remains unclear, but the scale of loss is measured not just in numbers but in the specific weight of individual absence. Tamang arrived in Kathmandu, Nepal's capital, with his family intact but with nothing else—no shelter, no money, no way forward. Like hundreds of others pulled from the disaster zone, he was left to find his own way to safety. He ended up at the Gosok Phuntsok Choeling monastery, a Buddhist temple that has opened its doors as a makeshift evacuation center.

When journalists visited, nearly 200 people were living in the monastery's large open room, their mattresses spread across the floor. Children drew on donated paper and pencils. Older women sat together, consoling one another. Everyone in the center had lost someone. One woman still bore scratches and marks across her arms from being partially buried; only some of her children had survived.

Alina Lama, who normally works as a trekking guide in the Himalayas, now runs the center with a clipboard and a network of young volunteers, most of them from the disaster zone itself. She is from Rasuwa district, the hardest-hit area. Her father's entire extended family is missing. Her parents, who lived higher up the mountainside, survived but witnessed the catastrophe unfold. "Within four minutes the whole valley was swept away, and it was all gone," she said. Lama has become a voice for the survivors, directing donations, recording names, and speaking plainly about what she sees as government carelessness. Survivors were airlifted from the disaster zone and then abandoned to make their own way to the capital, she said—left "mentally disturbed and going through a lot of things" with nothing to their names.

Aananda Thapa Magar, 19, is also from Timure. He has a collage on his phone of everyone he lost: his father, grandfather, uncle, brother, sister-in-law, and his three-year-old niece. He spoke to his father by phone just an hour before the flood swept through. He no longer expects his father to be found alive, but he hopes his body can be recovered so his family can perform the rituals that allow the dead to find peace in the afterlife. "The devastating flood ruined all our homes, our family, our village, our hope, our dreams," he said. "Everything that we love was in that village."

Yet Magar, like Lama, has turned his focus forward. Both are thinking about the children now sheltering in the monastery—the orphaned, the displaced, those whose entire world has been erased. Lama wants to see long-term planning for their education and housing. Magar wants them to have opportunities his parents did not. "We want our kids to have a good education and a very successful future so that they don't have to end up like our parents." Nepal's Finance Minister has estimated that rebuilding will cost between $4 billion and $5 billion. That figure measures infrastructure. The human cost—the missing, the orphaned, the families fractured—cannot be calculated in dollars.