At 97, she survived the flood that swept through her care home

At 97, Guna Maya Bohara survived the flood that tore through her room at an elderly care home in Devighat, a riverside town in Nepal’s Nuwakot district. Now in Bir Hospital in Kathmandu, she sometimes sings the bhajan “Hare Ram, Hare Krishna,” then asks the same question: “Why did the water hit me?”

Bohara has mostly stopped speaking. Her arms and legs are black and blue, and she sometimes makes sudden, involuntary movements before lying still again. Doctors have diagnosed her with acute stress disorder.

On the morning of August 26, Bohara had no idea that a glacier had collapsed high in the Himalayas. The collapse triggered a landslide, sending water and debris into the Trishuli River. The flood reached the care home’s ground floor and pushed Bohara to its edge. Witnesses said the current was weaker there. Some people caught in the water did not survive.

Nepal Police and Nepali Army personnel worked for about four hours to reach her, carefully shifting rubble in case others remained buried. Her relatives brought a JCB excavator and joined the effort. Dipak, Bohara’s great-nephew, remembers moving the debris inch by inch until workers could lift her out in the machine’s bucket.

The disaster added another ordeal to a life shaped by loss. Bohara married at eight, when child marriage was common, and outlived her husband by 81 years. She lost both parents and her only brother while still young, and never had children of her own. Instead, she raised 13 nephews and 12 nieces, sending them to school and packing roasted maize for their lunches. At 83, she chose to move into the care home, where she lived among people her own age and celebrated residents’ birthdays. She is now the last member of her generation in the family.

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Why did the water hit me?