When a 29-year-old woman died at Dhulikhel Hospital on Saturday, fear spread through the hospital, among her family and neighbours in her home town of Barabise, Teaching Hospital in Kathmandu where she had delivered a baby a week previously. No one wanted to touch her body in the hospital ward for the whole day.
Fanned by alarming reports of the spread of COVID-19 in the media, hospitals in Nepal are facing the problem of stigma of medical staff as well as patients. Now, with the first two fatalities from the disease there is also the added problem of handling of bodies and funerals.
For the whole day Saturday in Dhulikhel Hospital the problem was to organise the cremation of the young mother. The Ministry of Health got involved, but crucial help came from a group of volunteers in Bhaktapur who have been active since the 2015 earthquake in search and rescue after training from the Nepal Police and the Army.
Helping the helpless during lockdown, Marty Logan
The real frontliners in Nepal’s coronavirus fight are people like Arun Sainju, Rajesh Gainju of the volunteer group RNA-16 who have been helping out for the past two months at Bhaktapur Hospital because no one else would.
Since when the lockdown began on 24 March, the thirty-something Sainju and Gainju with other members of the team have been living in a tent inside the Bhaktapur Hospital premises in case they themselves are carriers of the virus.
They have been helping people coming in for tests, and transferring their swab samples to Kathmandu. They spend most days in their personal protection gowns and masks, transporting patients to hospital or disinfecting their homes.
“I was inspired to become a volunteer after I failed to save a 11-year-old girl who had drowned,” recalls Arun Sainju. “From that day on, I decided to be trained to work in emergency situations.”
The training came handy immediately when the earthquake struck five years ago, destroying a large part of Bhaktapur, killing at least 300 residents and destroying many homes. Arun and Rajesh worked shoulder to shoulder with the Nepal Army teams to dig survivors out of the rubble and take them to hospital.
This time, it was not a natural disaster, but a protracted humanitarian crisis. Most days, they are just helping where necessary, but Saturday’s call from the Nepal Army base was different: they were asked to go to Dhulikhel to collect the first COVID-19 fatality and bring it to Pashupati to the electric crematorium.
The authorities in Dhulikhel had asked Bhaktapur for help because no ambulance driver was willing to take her to the crematorium. The team was confident they were taking necessary precautions because they had been trained to handle infected patients, and headed out to Dhulikhel.
“It was like the hospital was in a curfew, not even the media was there,” Arun recalls. “At the morgue we saw blood dripping out of the body, and we wrapped her in plastic, and disinfected the morgue.”
The body was loaded into the team’s private SUV and escorted by army and police along the highway from Dhulikhel to Pashupati. The woman’s husband followed and kept a safe distance throughout.
“We are here to help people in need but we believe that even a dead person needs to be treated with dignity, and has the right to have a proper funeral,” says Rajesh.
Members of RNA-16 are often asked by friends and relatives why they do what they do, and if they are not scared. They admit that the hardest part is to be away from their families for so long for fear of taking the virus home. Arun has a 62-year-old mother, and Rajesh’s family has been living in a temporary shelter for five years after the earthquake destroyed their home.
Says Arun: “We do what we have to do, not helping would invite a bigger disaster for the community in future. That is what keeps us going and gives us a sense of fulfilment.”
At the electric crematorium, the woman’s family kept a distance, and only a member of the crematorium staff was in the switch room. There were no religious rituals, and finally Arun, Rajesh and his team lifted the body and placed it in the furnace.
They then incinerated their PPEs, disinfected their car and other material and have placed themselves in quarantine in Suryabinayak from where they spoke to Nepali Times on the phone.
The husband and relatives of the women were taken to the isolation ward of Dhulikhel Hospital. Other members of the RNA-16 are carrying on the COVID-19 work at Dhulikhel Hospital for now.
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