Namaste, diaspora family. A month ago the mountain came down on the Bhotekoshi. On Thursday afternoon in New York, which was the small hours of Friday at home, the Prime Minister stood at the green marble podium of the General Assembly and told the world about it. “Climate change does not recognize borders,” Balendra Shah said. “Glaciers and floods do not travel with a visa stamped on passports.” In the fourth-floor gallery, a good number of the people listening were Nepali, and they clapped. It was the kind of week where the news kept arriving from abroad. Fifty-seven members of the US Congress asked the White House to let Nepalis stay while the country rebuilds. A Boeing from Dubai landed in Pokhara on a scheduled flight for the first time. In Aichi, Japan, a young karateka from a rented room in Boudha won Nepal’s first medal of the Asian Games, the women’s kabaddi team won a second, and on Friday morning Nepal beat Afghanistan at cricket for the first time since 2014. At home, the missing count went down, and we explain below why that is not the good news it looks like. And as we publish, the rain has come back: flights are grounded, buses out of Kathmandu have stopped, and the Koshi barrage has all 31 gates open. We start, as we have for five weeks, with the count. Where Things Stand Figures from the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority as of Monday 21 September, unless stated: * Dead: 1,451. Chitwan 367, Rasuwa 236, Nawalparasi East 232, Nawalparasi West 222, Nuwakot 203, Gorkha 79, Dhading 72, Tanahu 38. By Friday, AP’s count was 1,453 (The Tribune, WTOP/AP). * Missing: 5,786, including 636 foreign nationals from 35 countries, down from 6,145 last Friday. AP put it at about 5,550 by Friday. This is not people being found alive. On Monday the authority began removing duplicate names: families had registered the same missing person in their home district and in Rasuwa or Nuwakot. Joint Secretary Balaram Niraula has told every district administration to check its list and enter only confirmed names in the Setu App. Expect the number to keep moving, in both directions (Nepal News, Ratopati). * At the dams: more than 800 workers at hydropower sites are still unaccounted for, Energy Minister Biraj Bhakta Shrestha told the House on Wednesday. At Upper Trishuli-1 alone, 439 of 1,433 workers are missing (The Kathmandu Post). * Identified: about 111 bodies returned to families. About 1,292 have been buried after DNA samples were taken, to be exhumed and handed over as matches come through. Police hold 3,283 samples (Nepal News). * Shelter: the Rs 15,000 monthly rent allowance is now being paid, and people are leaving the camps. Holding centres are down from 37 to 20, with 1,661 people: 786 in Rasuwa, 324 in Nuwakot, 121 in Dhading (Ratopati). * Land: a government committee has identified 277 plots, about 3,279 ropani (roughly 168 hectares), on which to resettle families who cannot go back: 177 plots in Rasuwa, 94 in Nuwakot, six in Dhading. The criterion is safety first, closeness to the old village second (Nepal Press). * Counting the cost properly: more than 250 officials with tablets began the full post-disaster needs assessment on Sunday. The House has set up a 15-member special committee on the flood and Himalayan climate change (Nepal News, HimalPress). * The rain, again: heavy to extremely heavy rain is forecast until Sunday. On Friday domestic flights were halted nationwide, public buses in and out of Kathmandu were stopped, all 31 gates of the Saptakoshi barrage were opened, and schools were closed in Chitwan, Butwal, Biratnagar and elsewhere. Flash-flood forecasts now run 48 hours ahead, up from 24. If your family is on the road, tell them to stop at night (Nepal News, The Kathmandu Post). 🌍 Diaspora & Globalisation “Glaciers and Floods Do Not Travel with a Visa” Balendra Shah had been Prime Minister for six months and had never left the country in the job. His first trip abroad was to the United Nations, and his first sentence there was this: “I come before you from Nepal, a distant country in the Himalayas, carrying a close warning for humanity.” In English, he walked the General Assembly through what he called a “Himalayan Tsunami”: at least 1,400 dead, more than 6,000 missing, recovery needs of about 10 percent of GDP, from a country that produces “less than 0.1 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions.” “We did not create this crisis,” he said. “Yet we are paying a colossal price for it.” The asks were specific. Money should come as grants, not loans: “When the house is burning, we do not ask the family to complete fifty forms. We act.” And he proposed a Himalayan Climate Resilience Mechanism in which Nepal, India and China share satellite data, monitor glacial lakes together and join up their early warnings: “Let the Himalayas become a laboratory of international cooperation, rather than a frontier of fragmented information.” The sharpest passage was about something else: the gas and fertiliser shortages that wars elsewhere have caused at home. Nepal, he said, had been “hit by the climate we did not warm, and again hit by the wars we did not start.” Then: “We have built a world with flawless logistics for war and broken logistics for food.” He ended in Nepali, asking Pashupatinath’s blessing on the world (The Kathmandu Post). Back home, the reviews were almost unanimous, which in Nepali politics is itself news. “The Prime Minister did not go representing any one party,” said Nepali Congress spokesperson Devraj Chalise. “He went representing the country and spoke the country’s language.” The UML’s Gokul Baskota called it “firm, meaningful, and strong,” and Baburam Bhattarai said the content was “correct!” (Ratopati). The dissent came from the analysts. In Nepal News, Binod Dhakal praised the Himalayan mechanism as genuinely new but noted that it has no secretariat, no funding formula and no sign yet that Delhi or Beijing have agreed to it. He also pointed out that the speech named no dollar figure. His verdict: “rhetoric is not a strategy and eloquence alone cannot finance a recovery” (Nepal News). Writing from New York, Ujjwal Prasai said the stronger message was solidarity rather than accusation, but “a powerful speech at the UN does not, by itself, produce a major achievement for Nepal” (OnlineKhabar). Shah’s only scheduled meeting was with António Guterres, who offered “deep sympathy,” recalled visiting Nepal as a tourist in 1978, and discussed the country’s graduation from least-developed status. Australia’s Anthony Albanese met him on the sidelines. He skipped the dinners. Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal did the rest: about forty engagements, and diplomatic relations with Grenada and Namibia, taking Nepal’s count to 187 countries. Earlier in the week, outside the building, Nepali activists had joined a climate-reparations rally. “The floods swept away our homes and lands but not our identity,” said Anisha Buda Magar of the National Indigenous Women Forum. Inside, from the fourth-floor gallery, the diaspora supplied the applause. The New York Times, for its part, wrote about his sunglasses (myRepublica, NepYork, NepYork, The Kathmandu Post, Ratopati). Fifty-Seven Signatures and a Deadline Two weeks ago one congressman wrote to Homeland Security asking for protection for Nepalis in the US. This week it was fifty-seven. Representatives Judy Chu, Grace Meng and Raja Krishnamoorthi led a letter to President Trump and Secretary Markwayne Mullin, co-signed by 54 colleagues including Republicans Brian Fitzpatrick and Maria Elvira Salazar, asking for Nepal to be designated for Temporary Protected Status under the environmental-disaster provision. Failing that, they ask for Deferred Enforced Departure and a pause on removals to the flood districts, with a reply by 9 October. More than 200 organisations have endorsed it, Adhikaar and the National TPS Alliance among them (NepYork, Quiver Quantitative). There is a gap in the campaign, and diaspora groups spotted it: as far as anyone has reported, Kathmandu has not formally asked. On Monday United for TPS Nepal and Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California wrote to Foreign Minister Khanal, who was in New York that week, urging the government to back the request. They estimate 30,000 to 50,000 people could qualify, about 25,000 of them students on F-1 visas. No reply has been reported (NepYork). Aid moved faster than immigration. After Khanal met Under Secretary of State Allison Hooker on Tuesday, Washington announced $31 million more, taking the total past $36 million: $10 million for permanent bridges, $8 million for shelter, water and winter supplies, and $13 million for US-made drones. “After I pressed officials before the Appropriations Committee, $36 million in aid and rescue support is finally being delivered,” said Meng, who says the first offer was one adviser and $500,000 (The Kathmandu Post, NepYork). The State Department’s version is that Nepal at first said it did not need much help. “Initially, the government of Nepal informed us that they believed that their own capacity was enough,” said spokesman Tommy Pigott. “We did see that change.” About 70 Americans are still unaccounted for (NepYork). The TPS that followed the 2015 earthquake ended last year, and this administration has not been generous with new designations. But a bipartisan letter with a date on it is harder to ignore than a single one. In Brief: Kuala Lumpur, the Gulf, and the ballot box. * “We do not like syndicates.” On Tuesday, Shah spoke by phone with Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim about the 25-agency recruitment list that has frozen new hiring from Nepal, where the Nepali workforce is already about 400,000 strong. “We do not like syndicates and the middleman system, and this is not acceptable under any circumstances,”
