Beneath Dubai’s scorching midday sun, 32-year-old Hari Krishna kneels to lay bricks for an upscale residential development. But his mind is 2,000 miles away, wandering the waterlogged mud and splintered debris that was once his home in Nepal’s Bhote Khosi-Trishuli corridor.
For seven straight days, this construction worker — who sends the vast majority of his earnings back to his family in Nepal — has dedicated every free second to frantically dialing relatives through the messaging app IMO and refreshing local news streams on his cracked smartphone screen. In late August, catastrophic flash floods tore through Nuwakot, Krishna’s home district, leaving a trail of destruction that has reshaped hundreds of communities across the country. As of this reporting, the disaster has claimed at least 1,399 lives nationwide, with nearly 5,400 people still unaccounted for. Floodwaters swept away bridges, paved roads, and entire hillside villages, and for Krishna’s family, the damage was total: their home, all their personal belongings, savings, jewelry, and a livestock shed holding their cows and goats were all washed away. With their farmland left ruined by the disaster, Krishna says any future for the family through agriculture is now impossible. Worse still, the flood claimed the life of his 67-year-old grandfather in Bidur Municipality, where the family resides.
“I had planned to come home for Dashain, but now that dream is gone with my grandfather,” Krishna told Middle East Eye, his voice shaking as he described the devastating loss his family has endured. “Right now, my relatives are sleeping in a government relief camp, terrified that another landslide could hit at any moment, while they try to arrange my grandfather’s funeral.”
Krishna requested emergency leave from his supervisor to return home, but the barriers to travel feel insurmountable. He cannot afford the cost of a last-minute flight, and even if he could, all road access to his remote village has been completely destroyed by floodwaters. “I wish I had been home and died in the flood with them instead of being stuck here, helpless,” he said.
Krishna’s desperate situation is far from unique. Hundreds of thousands of Nepali migrants work across the Gulf Cooperation Council states, building the gleaming skyscrapers and iconic skylines of Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia that draw global attention. As Nepal confronts one of the worst climate-driven disasters in its modern history, the entire weight of the country’s reconstruction will fall disproportionately on the shoulders of these migrant workers. Nepal’s economy is deeply dependent on its diaspora: remittances make up roughly one-third of the nation’s total gross domestic product, and data from Nepal Rastra Bank shows that 40 percent of all Nepali remittances come from Gulf nations.
United Nations agencies including the International Labour Organisation have long highlighted how systemic crises lay bare the extreme vulnerability of these migrant workers. Across every stage of their migration journey, Nepali laborers face persistent hazards, from withheld wages to extremely limited access to basic healthcare. Rameshwar Nepal, an investigator for Equidem, a global human and labor rights nonprofit coordinating disaster relief for affected workers and their families from Kathmandu, explained that most migrant workers are desperate to return home after the disaster, but logistical and regulatory barriers trap them thousands of miles from their loved ones.
“While their families and communities are living through total devastation back home, they are stuck here in the Gulf,” he said. “All they want is to get home, be with their relatives, confirm who is safe, and see the damage to their homes and property with their own eyes.”
Even when workers can secure permission to travel and scrape together flight fare, deep uncertainty hangs over their ability to return to their Gulf-based jobs after the crisis. “They have no way of knowing if they will be allowed to re-enter the country after leaving, if their employers will approve leave, or even if they can take unpaid leave, which most are forced to consider,” Nepal explained. Beyond immediate travel concerns, workers fear the long-term damage to their livelihoods: after losing everything back home, these jobs are their only lifeline, and they cannot afford to risk losing them by leaving.
Nepal added that the Gulf’s restrictive labor sponsorship framework, known as the kafala system, worsens this crisis of mobility, drawing a parallel to the mass stranding of migrant workers during the 2020 Covid-19 lockdowns. “The kafala system systematically strips migrant workers of their freedom of movement, and that cruelty becomes impossible to ignore during crises like this,” he said. “We saw exactly this same situation in 2020: workers were desperate to get home to their families, but they were blocked from leaving. It’s an inherently inhumane system.”
Thirty-seven-year-old Shiva Ujjwal, a Nepali driver based in Qatar, is living this nightmare. For the past three years, he has shuttled workers from sprawling labor camps on Doha’s outskirts to office parks and construction sites across the Qatari capital. Ujjwal was starting his pre-dawn shift when the floods hit, and before he could check social media for updates, fellow workers broke the news to him. When he finally got permission to use his phone, every call he made failed: floodwaters had destroyed regional communication networks entirely.
“My heart felt like it was breaking when I saw the first videos of the damage online,” Ujjwal recalled. “I knew from the scale of the flood that my house was almost certainly gone, but all I could think about was whether my family was alive.”
While Ujjwal’s wife, children, and parents managed to escape to safety before the flood hit, nine of his extended relatives were killed, and dozens more from his small village are still missing. “My family ran for their lives with nothing — they didn’t have time to grab identity documents, money, or any of our valuables,” he said. “We lost every single thing we owned in less than five seconds, that flood hit faster than a bullet.”
Before moving to Qatar three years ago, Ujjwal worked in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and he spent more than a decade slowly building his family’s home in Nepal one floor at a time, funding each phase with the modest wages he earned working abroad. Those earnings, while not lavish, were enough to keep his family fed and housed. Now, all that years of work is gone, and he is forced to start over from nothing. “We lost all our property in less than five seconds by a single hit of a live-bullet-type flood,” Ujjwal said.
His supervisor has agreed to let him return to Nepal on unpaid leave, but the weeks of total communication blackout at the start of the crisis have left deep emotional scars, and the distance weighs on him constantly. “It’s impossible to relax here when my family is stuck in a relief camp,” he said. “I have to think about how I’m going to build a new home for them all over again. I show up to work every day, but my mind is back home with them. My body is here, but I am not.”
Across the Gulf, the Nepali diaspora has mobilized quickly to respond to the crisis. Grassroots fundraising campaigns circulate widely on WhatsApp groups, where workers pool whatever small savings they can spare to ship emergency relief to the hardest-hit districts. But for workers like Krishna and Ujjwal, even the most generous financial support cannot replace being home with their families during this devastating time.