Canadian families still waiting for answers one week after Nepal disaster

Neeral Patel sent well-wishes to her cousin on his birthday last Wednesday, but she never heard back.

Her cousin Ishan Patel was in Nepal at the time, not far from the border with China, where a devastating flash flood ripped through the valley that same day.

She’s calling for a wider international response to help in rescue efforts as the days tick by with no word on her cousin or the three family members he was travelling with.

“We want to give a lot of hope. But with each passing day, it’s just getting chipped away, and time is of the essence,” said Patel, who lives in Toronto.

Ishan Patel was travelling with his wife, Akanksha Patel, both dual Canadian-U. S. citizens, along with his mother, Shilpa Patel, and father-in-law, Umesh Patel, who are Canadian, she said.

The four were on a long-planned pilgrimage to Mount Kaliash ahead of Ishan Patel starting a new job as an orthopedic surgeon, after finishing his fellowship in July, said Neeral Patel.

“It was kind of the big holy beginnings to his new career.”

The flooding on Aug. 26 killed more than 1,100 people and left roughly 4,400 missing, after a glacier collapsed in the Himalayan border region between Nepal and China.

In Kathmandu, police have buried dozens of unidentified bodies in trenches because there are too many to keep or identify individually.

The scale of the disaster is hampering rescue efforts, as landslides and destroyed roads have cut off remote areas.

Rescuers were also racing to reach hundreds of hydropower workers trapped in tunnels.

Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand has said 30 Canadians and permanent residents are among the missing — a number that may change as the government gets more information.

With so many still unaccounted for, Neeral Patel said family members have been left scouring the internet, looking on Nepal police sites and missing identity sites to see if the names of any relatives come up.

She said two family members have also travelled to Kathmandu to look in hospitals and anywhere else they can find answers, but the roads up to the flood-hit area are closed.

Making the wait even harder is that they know where to search, she said, because her cousin’s phone pinged from a spot a short distance from Hotel Kailash, where they had breakfast last Wednesday.

“This is why we’re urging everyone to please, in the right area, search as much as you can, because we’re coming up to a week’s time and still no news,” she said.