Nepal Woman Found Alive 10 Days After Family Began Mourning

When police officer Mahendra Darnal walked past the ruins of a collapsed home in Betrawati village, he heard something impossible: a voice calling "save me" from deep within the debris. Ten days earlier, the family of Chandika Kumari Shrestha had given up hope and started traditional mourning rites for the elderly woman they believed had perished in Nepal's catastrophic floods.

But Shrestha was alive, surviving in a tiny pocket of air inside her four-story house that had been swallowed by quicksand and mud. The home had been swept away in the torrent that devastated the village, leaving it buried in white deposits that hardened almost like concrete.

Darnal and his rescue team spent 45 minutes carefully extracting Shrestha from the confined space on Saturday. She was immediately transported to an army hospital for treatment.

Her rescue offers a stunning ray of hope in the wake of Nepal's deadliest disaster in recent memory. The floods, triggered by a glacial collapse eleven days ago, killed more than 1,300 people and left close to 5,000 still missing.

Sunny's Take

Shrestha isn't the only miracle emerging from the tragedy. Rescuers also found an 8-year-old boy alive and reunited him with his mother. Since Friday, crews have pulled three people from tunnels along the Trishuli river, including a Chinese citizen, where more than 900 people are believed trapped.

The rescue teams haven't given up. Workers in hard hats continue digging through the hardened mud with shovels, crawling through gaps in collapsed buildings and periodically blowing whistles to catch the attention of anyone still alive underneath.

Betrawati was among the hardest hit areas, with its entire market and most residential buildings nearly buried under debris. The town sits in a valley that became a pathway for the devastating torrent.

While crews continue the heartbreaking work of recovering bodies, each person found alive renews the determination of rescue workers to keep searching. Shrestha's survival after ten days proves that even when hope seems lost, miracles can happen in the most unexpected places.