‘My heart is aching’: Wall of the missing lays bare desperate race to find Nepal victims

Kathmandu: A wall in Nepal’s largest hospital has been covered with photographs as relatives try to track down their loved ones.

Each day, visitors put pictures of the missing up at Tribhuvan Teaching Hospital in Kathmandu, in the hope that staff or passers-by will recognise the face and say they are alive.

Almost 4000 people, ranging from toddlers to the elderly, remain missing in Nepal after a flood swept down the country’s border with Tibet last week.

Among them is 31-year-old Bishal Nepali, whose sister, Sunita, broke down in tears as she added his photograph to the crowded rows.

“Urgent request for search and rescue. Our family is worried. After flooding we have no contact with him,” read the note attached to the poster.

Nepali’s wife, 26-year-old Monita Nepali, said he had often crossed the Chinese border.

Bishal and Monita Nepali last spoke at 7am on Wednesday, about two hours before the flood, when he went out for a morning walk in the border region. His phone has been off ever since.

“My heart is aching and my hope is fading. I feel he will come back but with each passing day I lose hope of his return,” Monita Nepali said.

Over the weekend, the Nepalese authorities began to use mass burial sites after morgues ran out of room to store the decomposing bodies.

With morgues full and humid temperatures speeding up decomposition, authorities said they had no choice but to bury bodies before they had been identified.

“We have decided to bury the unidentified bodies because we don’t have the capacity to preserve all the bodies recovered from the flood-affected areas,” said Rajendra Prasad Dhamala, a Nepalese government spokesman.

In Bharatpur, three hospital morgues had reached capacity, forcing authorities to establish makeshift facilities.

Some 200 unidentified bodies were buried in a nearby forest, beneath numbered metal markers in concrete pots.

At the burial site, security workers in protective gear carried the bodies, one by one, on stretchers as cameras recorded the process.