NEW YORK (AP) – As the days trickle by after the devastating earthquake in Nepal, the silence has brought agony for Nepalese-Americans still waiting to hear the fate of their loved ones.
Some pray. Others clutch their cellphones, sleepless and watching news reports of decimated buildings and bodies laid out on the ground. Still more keep themselves busy organizing relief efforts and maintaining shrines of candles and flowers of both hope and mourning as a steadily rising death toll surpassed 6,000.
“My wife and my relatives are every day crying,” said Ram Tamang, who nearly a week after the calamity has yet to hear any word about five family members believed to be trapped under the rubble. “They need to reach them as soon as possible.”
Tamang is among an estimated 30,000 Nepalese immigrants in the New York City metropolitan area – including parts of bordering Connecticut and New Jersey – the largest such concentration in the nation. Smaller clusters are in the Washington, D.C., area; Dallas, Houston, Irving, and Forth Worth, Texas; Somerville, Massachusetts; Chicago; and San Francisco.
About 5,000 have settled in New York’s Queens borough, where a makeshift candle shrine in the Jackson Heights neighborhood was created in the shape of the letters N-E-P-A-L, under a wall awash in sticky notes in honor of the missing and dead. It has become the main Nepalese gathering spot in New York; hundreds of people form a sea of cross-legged humanity chanting Buddhist prayers on the bare pavement.