分类： society

Just two days before a catastrophic glacial outburst triggered deadly flash floods across the Himalayan border region shared by Nepal and China, local Nepali filmmaker and professional drone pilot Manish Maharjan crossed back into Nepal via the Rasuwagadhi border checkpoint – the same crossing closest to the disaster’s origin. What he did not anticipate on his return home was that his specialized piloting skills would quickly become a critical asset for rescue operations along a route he has traveled extensively for work over the years.

When catastrophic flash floods struck on August 26, authorities across both countries immediately mobilized dozens of search-and-rescue and relief teams. One day after the disaster unfolded, Maharjan volunteered his expertise to embed with the Nepal Army’s rescue mission. The disaster has already claimed more than 1,000 lives across Nepal and southern Tibet, leaving thousands more unaccounted for.

Maharjan’s primary role has been operating thermal-equipped drones to support ground teams, with a core focus on locating nearly 900 missing workers from 12 regional hydropower projects that were completely buried under massive mudslides and debris. Of these missing workers, an estimated 500 are thought to have been trapped inside hydropower plant tunnels when the flood hit.

The drone pilot explained that unmanned aerial systems have proven remarkably effective for pinpointing survivors stranded on isolated hillsides and in hard-to-reach locations such as mountain caves. Beyond thermal imaging to detect body heat, Maharjan’s team adapted creative tactics to draw out trapped people. “We mounted microphone speakers to our drones to call out to anyone who might be stuck. In some areas, we even played music and waited for a response,” he shared. “That tactic actually worked in a handful of cases, and helped us locate survivors who could not be seen from the air.”

While drones have successfully helped extract stranded people from open terrain, searching the collapsed hydropower tunnels has presented an entirely unprecedented set of challenges, Maharjan noted. When teams have scanned tunnel entrances, they found the structures completely packed solid with mud, dense as toothpaste squeezed into a tube, with no hollow or empty space left inside for survivors to take shelter.

The disaster originated high in the Himalayas, when scientists analyzing post-event satellite imagery confirmed that a section of bedrock beneath a glacial formation collapsed, pulling a portion of the overlying glacier down with it. The scale of the rockfall was so massive that it registered as a magnitude 5.2 seismic event on global monitoring systems. The cascading rock and melted glacial water surged down into the river valleys below, creating a destructive wall of water that swept through communities and infrastructure across both Tibet and Nepal.

The torrent destroyed critical regional infrastructure, including the under-construction and operating hydropower projects, highways, residential buildings, and bridges. According to Mohan Kumar Dangi, president of Nepal’s Independent Power Producers’ Association, some workers inside the tunnels managed to place emergency calls for help when the flood hit, and workers who successfully escaped confirmed their colleagues remained trapped inside. To date, there has been no confirmed contact with the trapped workers since those initial distress calls.

As the clock ticks past the critical 72-hour window for rescue, search teams face rapidly dwindling odds of finding additional survivors. Survival experts emphasize that access to clean water and breathable air are non-negotiable for people trapped in disaster settings, and chances of survival drop sharply once the 72-hour mark passes without rescue.

At the Rasuwagadhi hydropower project, Maharjan successfully maneuvered his drone all the way to the end of the tunnel’s main corridor, scanning every inch for signs of life. No signs of survival were detected. “We checked the space repeatedly, but the entire tunnel was just filled with mud and debris,” he said. “Just looking at the extent of the blockage, you can only imagine the incredible force of the flood that did this.”

Tunnel search operations remain incredibly difficult beyond the full blockage at many sites, Maharjan added. The layout of most hydropower tunnels limits the ability of drones to operate effectively. “I can only safely and effectively fly drones in long, straight tunnel sections,” he explained. “Once there are bends, turns, or zigzags in the layout, controlling the drone and conducting a thorough search becomes exponentially harder.”

In a makeshift emergency shelter carved out of a Buddhist monastery in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, Tsering Gelbu Lama sits on the cold stone floor, brushing away unbidden tears. His 4-year-old daughter sits at his feet, unaware that her mother was swept to her death just days earlier when catastrophic floodwaters burst through mountain valleys along the Nepal-Tibet border. As he coaxes a spoonful of rice into the young girl’s mouth, his biggest fear reaches far beyond the loss of his wife and the home his family built on ancestral land: he has no idea how he will carry forward their centuries-old Indigenous cultural traditions to raise her in their faith and customs.

For Lama and hundreds of other flood survivors evacuated from remote Himalayan villages in Nepal’s northern Rasuwa district, the disaster has amplified a slow-burning crisis that was already eroding their community identities. Decades of outmigration of young people seeking education and work in Nepal’s cities have already weakened intergenerational transmission of local traditions. Now, the catastrophic floods have erased entire villages, swept away irreplaceable cultural heirlooms, destroyed restored religious sites, and killed dozens of community elders who carried oral knowledge of rituals, languages and customs — leaving displaced survivors questioning whether their unique way of life can survive at all.

“We’ve become homeless not only because we’ve lost our land — we’ve become homeless with our culture and tradition,” explained 36-year-old Tsering Sherpa, a Rasuwa native now staying at the Kathmandu monastery shelter, as he leaned against the stone steps of the building.

Nepal is one of the most ethnically diverse nations in South Asia, home to more than 120 distinct Indigenous and ethnic groups, many of which have preserved unique languages, ritual practices, and community festivals passed unchanged through hundreds of generations. Rasuwa district, tucked into the high Himalayan peaks along Nepal’s northern border with the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, is renowned for its tight-knit Indigenous Buddhist communities, whose unique cultural practices have even drawn international tourists to the region’s popular Tamang Heritage Trail, a trekking route that showcases local life and sacred traditions.

Survivors sheltering in Kathmandu still carry vivid memories of life before the floodwaters arrived. They describe villages nestled between steep forested hills teeming with bears, deer, and brightly colored butterflies, where rivers cut through lush green valleys. In shared photos and videos captured before the disaster, they show moments of daily cultural life: groups of women gathering to chop juniper for ritual incense, community members crafting new decorations for a local monastery that was being rebuilt, and men and women in vibrant handwoven traditional clothing dancing together during annual religious festivals.

“Now all of it is finished,” said 20-year-old Tenzin Dolma Ghale, a young survivor from Rasuwa.

When the floodwaters surged following heavy seasonal rains, residents described scrambling up steep hillsides to escape the rushing current, many finding temporary refuge in local monasteries that had only been rebuilt a year earlier — replacing structures that were completely destroyed in the devastating 2015 Gorkha earthquake that shook the Nepalese Himalayas. Most survivors had no time to grab belongings from their homes before evacuating; many were airlifted out by rescue helicopters with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. Others lost centuries-old family heirlooms that were meant to be passed down through generations, objects that carried both cultural and personal meaning for their communities.

The crisis of cultural preservation predates this year’s devastating floods, according to Alina Lama, a 26-year-old Rasuwa native who now volunteers at the Kathmandu shelter. For years, young people have left remote mountain villages for Nepal’s urban centers to access better education and job opportunities, drawn to the promise of more “modern” lives. This slow outmigration has already broken many intergenerational cultural ties: Alina Lama herself notes that she never learned many small, core details of her community’s traditions because she spent most of her young adulthood away from her village studying and working.

Now, the disaster has created an urgent new set of concerns, particularly for children who lost their parents in the floodwaters. “We don’t know who will teach them,” Alina Lama said.

International aid group Save the Children estimates that thousands of children across flood-affected regions are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance, though no official data has been released on how many children have been orphaned by the disaster.

For religious communities, the loss runs even deeper. With local Himalayan monasteries destroyed by floodwaters and many senior community monks — who carry specialized, localized knowledge of ritual practice — dead or displaced, key annual traditions are already at risk of disappearing. Tsering Sherpa points to the region’s important autumn Buddhist festivals, which for centuries have been held in local village monasteries, as an example of what the community stands to lose.

“We used to celebrate these festivals in our monasteries. Right now we don’t even have a monastery,” he said. “Culture and tradition are passed generation to generation by practice. If I can’t follow the tradition now, how can I pass it on to the next generation?”

This reporting on climate and environmental impacts on communities is supported by private philanthropic funding, with The Associated Press retaining full editorial control over all content.

Nestled in the northern Malaysian state of Penang, the town of Bukit Mertajam comes alive every seventh month of the Chinese lunar calendar for one of Southeast Asia’s most enduring traditional Chinese religious celebrations: the Hungry Ghost Festival, centered on the veneration of Da Shi Ye, the Guardian God of Ghosts.

This year’s festival, which ran for 15 days from mid-August, traces its origins all the way back to 1888, when a devastating plague swept through Bukit Mertajam. In the wake of the outbreak, local Chinese ancestors established the ritual of worshipping Da Shi Ye to appease and care for wandering spirits, a practice that has remained uninterrupted for more than 135 years.

At the heart of the celebration stands a towering handcrafted effigy of Da Shi Ye, built from paper and bamboo. Following generations-old custom, the effigy is increased by roughly two centimeters every year. In 2025, the effigy stands at nearly 29 feet tall. For 69-year-old artisan Ng Chi Wong, who has devoted more than 40 years of his life to crafting these figures, the construction process is a masterclass in tacit tradition. A team of seven to eight builders spend roughly 45 days completing the work, with no formal blueprints to guide them. “Most of the design and construction details are already in our minds,” Ng explained. Builders start with the intricately detailed head, before assembling the bamboo frame, shaping the body, adding outer paper layers, and finishing with hand-painted details. While small incremental improvements have modernized minor parts of the process, Ng says the craft demands more than technical skill: artisans must also deeply understand the cultural and spiritual roots of the tradition to honor it properly.

Unlike Qingming Festival (Tomb-Sweeping Day), which centers on honoring one’s own family ancestors, the Hungry Ghost Festival extends care specifically to unclaimed wandering spirits—people who died with no surviving family members to pray for them or offer them sustenance in the afterlife. Lim Han Cong, a Chinese studies graduate from the University of Malaya, explains that the festival weaves together beliefs from Buddhism, Taoism, and Chinese folk religion. “At its core, the Ghost Festival expresses the belief that the living and the dead remain connected through enduring moral and emotional bonds,” Lim said. “The living, therefore, have a responsibility to honor, support and help the deceased attain peace.” During the festival, Taoist priests recite sacred scriptures and conduct ritual ceremonies to guide these lost spirits to peace and salvation.

This year’s festival culminated in the traditional ceremonial burning of the Da Shi Ye effigy, a ritual that symbolically sends the deity back to the spirit world. Lee Kim Fong, the event’s general affairs coordinator, estimates that more than 10,000 people attended this year’s closing ceremony, with peak crowds swelling to 20,000. Devotees travel to Bukit Mertajam not just from across Malaysia, but also from neighboring Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand, mirroring similar celebrations held in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan.

Far from remaining a static ritual locked in the past, the century-old festival has evolved to take on new meaning and roles for the local Chinese community. Since the 1970s, organizers have integrated charitable community work into the festival’s schedule. Auctions of blessed ritual offerings and targeted fundraising campaigns generate funds that support low-income residents with urgent medical needs and sustain local Chinese-language education. “It has also become an important platform for strengthening community solidarity,” Lim noted, explaining that the celebration now extends far beyond its original spiritual purpose of honoring the dead.

To adapt to modern times and ensure the tradition can be passed to future generations, organizers have also embraced digital innovation. For devotees who live overseas or cannot travel to Bukit Mertajam for the festival, the committee has introduced online worship options, allowing participants to join prayers and submit offerings remotely. A professional media crew documented the entire 15-day 2025 celebration from August 14 to 29, and organizers plan to upload full footage to Facebook to make the Da Shi Ye festival accessible to audiences around the globe.

“As descendants of the Chinese community, we have a responsibility to preserve this 100-year-old tradition,” Lee said.

This report was contributed to by AP video journalist Syawalludin Zain, with Hernández reporting from Beijing. Associated Press religion coverage is supported through AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP holds sole responsibility for this content.