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Good Shepherd Sr. Taskila Nicholas was one of the people in Nepal who did not feel the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that rocked the country April 25. She was on a bus from Pokhara to Kathmandu to inaugurate her congregation’s newest satellite community.
“We didn’t feel anything because we were on a big bus,” she told Global Sisters Report in Kathmandu on Tuesday. “People started calling passengers on the bus to ask ‘are you alive?’ That’s how we heard about the earthquake.” She was only about 100 kilometers from the epicenter.
The bus pulled over, and people began to notice clouds of dust and debris coming down to a river. But from the road, the passengers couldn’t see any destruction. So they continued on their way to Dhading, the last big city before Kathmandu.
“As we got into Dhading we could see that things had fallen, that schools and buildings had come down,” Nicholas recalled. “We didn’t really understand how big it was. But then we saw people crying, and bodies laid out in the road waiting to be taken to the hospital. They were bleeding and had broken bones.”
“This was a spiritual experience for me, I understood that God really wanted me to serve the people in Kathmandu,” said Nicholas, who loved living in Pokhara and was nervous about the move. “It really was a miracle. The road from Pokhara to Kathmandu is a mountain on one side and a river on the other. Who knows what could have happened . . . but Jesus said, ‘Even if you walk in the dark valley, I am with you.’ I really felt Jesus was driving the vehicle.”
Somehow, the bus made it to Kathmandu that evening, where the sisters joined the Jesuits, who had offered them a temporary home. “That first night, we didn’t know if we were safe or not; we just slept in the hands of God,” she said.
Two days after the earthquake, when Nicholas was traveling with the Catholic aid group Caritas and saw a
tar road completely split in two, she realized how lucky she was to have been on the bus. People told her that some smaller vehicles were thrown in the air by the force of the earthquake.
Before the earthquake, two Good Shepherd Sisters had planned to work in Kathmandu at St. Xavier’s Jesuit high school and with girls at risk of being trafficked. But because of the earthquake, Nicholas has decided to shift the mission to relief and rehabilitation. Good Shepherd Sr. Lucy George is overseeing a mobile medical clinic, which is traveling around the hard-hit Gorkha region, west of Kathmandu. The sisters will still target women and children, some of the most vulnerable groups, especially through counseling and psycho-social services.
“Even though people lost their dear ones, they had no time to mourn, they had to look after the survivors,” Nicholas said. “One day they’ll have to let out all this sadness.”
The Good Shepherd Sisters are coordinating with the Salesian brothers and sisters, Caritas, the Sisters of the Congregation of Jesus, and the Nepal Jesuit Society, among others, for a unified Catholic response to the earthquake.
By Melanie Lidman for Global Sisters Report
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