These Heart Wrenching Narratives From Sikkim Relief Camps Will Leave You With Tears

Her life has been unchanged for the last five days. She awakens each day at the senior secondary school auditorium of the government in Singtam, southeast Sikkim. She asks the same questions every day, and each time, the solution becomes inescapably obvious. She inquires with the authorities about their knowledge of her father. They consistently claim they haven’t, she says. One of the largest relief camps dot the mountains, home to 630 people, including Joshna Khan, after the Wednesday’s flash floods in Sikkim left 82 people dead and 105 people missing. But even in the midst of a common tragedy, Khan’s sorrow is private. She is the only inhabitant among them who has lost a relative.

Relief camps in Sikkim

There are currently 28 relief camps in Sikkim housing a total of 6,487 people. With 10 such camps, Gangtok is the district with the most. The flood floods engulfed Khan’s home in the Lal Bazaar neighborhood at 2 am on Wednesday, leaving them little time to flee. “We all rushed out of our houses to reach higher ground. But in the melee I lost my father. He was washed away by the flood waters. I lost my mother a few years ago and now he is gone. I have been left alone,” Khan said.

Khan is grieving and alone as he considers the future.  “I was unable to bring anything out – documents, clothes, money. My house at Lal Bazar is gone. I don’t know where to go or what to do after this. I will not be able to stay here forever,” she said. The exact clothes she left her house in are still on her body.

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School buildings filled with sorrow

The three-story school building, which formerly housed 1400 school children in a cacophony, is now completely filled by scraggly people who no longer have safe dwellings, 30 kilometers from the state capital Gangtok. According to the school’s principal, SK Pradhan, all 10 of the first and second levels’ classrooms, as well as the auditorium on the third floor, have been made accessible to flood victims. Police officers who work there as night guards have been given one staff room.