Nepal quake death toll hits nearly 5,000 as aid trickles in to hard-hit village near epicentre
Remote areas remain without relief, and anger is increasing among desperate residents who lack basic supplies of food, shelter and water
There is almost nothing left of this village but enormous piles of broken red bricks and heaps of mud and dust.
One of those piles was once Bhoj Kumar Thapa's home, where his pregnant wife pushed their five-year-old daughter to safety in a last, desperate act before it collapsed and killed her during Saturday's earthquake.
On Tuesday, Thapa and others in Paslang were still waiting for the government to deliver food, tents - any kind of aid - to this poor mountain village near the epicentre of the quake that killed more than 4,700 people, injured over 8,000 and left tens of thousands homeless.
"When I got home, there was nothing," said Thapa, an army soldier. "Everything was broken. My wife - she was dead."
He was put on leave from his army unit to mourn, one of the few Nepalese soldiers not deployed in the country's massive rescue and recovery operation. But instead of sadness, there is mounting anger.
"Only the other villagers who have also lost their homes are helping me. But we get nothing from the government," Thapa complained.
An official came, took some pictures and left - without delivering anything to the village of about 300 people north of the capital Kathmandu, he said.
"I get angry, but what can I do? I am also working for the government," Thapa said. "I went to ask the police if they could at least send some men to help us salvage our things, but they said they have no one to send."
WATCH: Trail of destruction across Nepal, as hospitals are overwhelmed by injured
Paslang is only 3km up the mountain from the town of Gorkha, the district headquarters and staging area for rescue and aid operations. But the villagers, who have no idea when they might get help, are still sleeping together in the mud and sharing whatever scraps of food they can pull from beneath their ruined buildings. Three people in the hamlet are known to have died.
Officials and foreign aid workers who have rushed to Nepal following the magnitude 7.9 earthquake are struggling against stormy weather, poor roads and a shortage of manpower and funds to get assistance to the needy. On Tuesday, the district managed to coordinate 26 helicopter trips to remote villages to evacuate 30 injured people before a major downpour halted the effort.
"We need 15,000 plastic tarps alone. We cannot buy that number," said Mohan Pokhran, a district disaster management committee member. Only 50 volunteer army and police officers are distributing food and aid for thousands in the immediate vicinity, he said.
"We don't have nearly enough of anything," Pokhran said.
On Tuesday came more tragedy: A mudslide and avalanche struck near the village of Ghodatabela and 250 people were feared missing, district official Gautam Rimal said. Heavy snow had been falling, and the ground beneath may have been loosened by the earthquake. But there also was also some heartening news: French rescuers freed a man from the ruins of a three-story Kathmandu hotel, near the main bus station.
The man, identified as Rishi Khanal, was conscious and taken to a hospital; no other information about him was released.
Across central Nepal, including Kathmandu, hundreds of thousands of people remained living in the open without clean water or sanitation more than three days after the quake. It rained heavily in the city on Tuesday, forcing people to find shelter wherever they could.
While many across Nepal are opting to sleep outdoors for fear of the constant aftershocks, those in Paslang have no choice because almost no buildings are left standing. At night, the survivors huddle together against the cold, rain and mosquitoes, and wait for dawn to come.
Tilak Bahadur Rana, a farmer, still has a tin roof over his head but the cold rain leaks in.
"In any case, I can't sleep. I am too stressed. I worry about how I will feed my family," he said.
Some in Paslang have seen sacks of food being flown by helicopter to remote regions reachable only by air, without stopping. The arrival in the village of a diesel generator on Tuesday, carried by "a nice charity man" from a foreign aid group that no one could identify, brought moments of much-needed elation as dozens crowded around to charge their cellphones on four attached power sockets.
Sitting in the mud and sharing tea made over an open fire with his wife and children, Rana confessed he was losing heart.
"Because of this earthquake, the whole village is destroyed. We need food. We need a place to sleep, or compensation for all we have lost," he said.
Instead, the villagers are pooling anything they can rescue from the ruins, which isn't much: a pile of garlic bulbs, wax honeycombs and some bed rolls, door knobs, metal pans, and portraits of Nepal's last king and queen.
To help feed his family of 10, Loba Thapa dug into the brick dust that was once a simple building where he stored his livestock and food.
Thapa - no relation to the soldier - sifted out some millet and cornmeal, even though it contained powdered brick, pebbles and livestock dung … it was all the family had to eat.
