Building a bridge: Charikot to Singati
On the way from Charikot to Singati we came across many road expansion projects. At one point we came across a large project constructing a motorable bridge across the river. There were people people creating gravel from rocks (presumably slate), using only small sledge hammers. The older men doing this sat by the river with a pile of gravel to their right, and large rocks to their left. Their pace seemed more leisurely than that of the younger men and women pouring concrete into the bridge frame above.
The second group of labourers were creating the bridge support itself. The crew consisted of a few women, and many young men. Two young men were shoveling gravel into a basket on a woman’s back. The woman then moved to the cement mixer, and dumped the gravel and likely sand into the cement mixer. Water and cement was added by the woman and boy beside the cement mixer. The mixer would tip and slide the cement down a ramp into the bridge form every two to three minutes. Three labourers would take the newly poured cement, and spread it out within the bridge frame. Most of the woman labourers both here and in many road construction projects, carry the the materials around the site. Here, there were two women who were doing more diversified work, one working the the sand pile and the other supplying the water to the mixer.
There was a large-scale digger or backhoe across the river, loading rock into a small carrier. The carrier truck made a trip across the river to bring gravel to the bridge construction. As it crossed the flowing river, the wheels were submerged below about a foot of water. As an observer, there was an awe for the drivers of the truck, and also a real fear that the truck would sink into the river bed. Families of the road workers were also camped out at the work site, in pop-up lean-tos, which was where many of the workers ate. Accompanying the families were other on-lookers who had come to the area to vote.
The ‘ghost city’: Gumu Khola
Walking along the old trade route between Charikot and Singati running along the west bank of the Tama Koshi River, we came to the abandoned bazaar town of Gumu Khola. Walking into Gumu Khola felt like entering into one of the abandoned ruins in Zelda. There was debris everywhere, with only the facades of buildings still intact. The marketplace was home to a succession of abandoned stone buildings, a handful of chickens, and one family. Gumu Khola was once home to over 20 vendors and a bustling trade town. It is now what Shyam calls, a “ghost city”. The buildings are all weakened or destroyed from the earthquake, but much of the bazaar was abandoned years before. With the opening of the Charikot-Singati road running parallel to us through the hills further northwest, and its continued improvement (recently by the Upper Tamakoshi Hydropower Project), the flow of people and things has been re-routed. The trade route which once supplied foottraffic in and out of this bazaar is now a small overgrown path traversed by the farmers who reside along it but few others. Indeed, once we passed the city of Dolakha, (about an hour’s walk from Charikot), the only people that we came across on the trail were those carrying their own produce, firewood, or fence posts. Gumu Khola’s