Girls scarred by Nepal quake share friendship, but not luck

KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP) — Nirmala pouts when her father fits the prosthetic leg onto her stump and wraps the long straps around her waist.

[...] she limps around the Kathmandu sweatshop that is now her home.

Nirmala lives a few minutes from where a neighbor's apartment collapsed around her in last year's earthquake, crushing her right leg and requiring it to be amputated inches below her waist.

Khendo had a stroke of luck that could change her life: A foreign traveler who stumbled across her when she was badly injured is now paying to send her to a private school in Kathmandu.

The government spent most of the past year wrangling over the country's constitution, a debate that sparked ethnic turmoil in Nepal's plains, a diplomatic spat with New Delhi and, for more many months, a blocked border with India that reduced fuel supplies to a trickle.

Visit the neighborhood around Kathmandu's Gangabu bus terminal, where about 140 people were killed and more than 200 buildings were damaged or destroyed.

Or go to the back lanes of Bhaktapur, an ancient city just outside Kathmandu, where entire rows of houses remain nothing but piles of rubble.

The dirt has been swept away, and sheds have been built out of corrugated metal sheets distributed after the quake.

Officials have warned villagers that vague new regulations forbid rebuilding their houses using traditional construction methods — basically using stacked rocks, mud and a handful of wooden beams.

Small modern houses, with concrete pillars reinforced with steel rods, can cost $10,000, a fortune in these villages and far beyond the help the government has promised.

[...] only 661 families whose homes were destroyed received any reconstruction money.

When the quake hit that Saturday, he was out running errands and she was at a neighbor's watching television.

[...] though, Nirmala was gone, a bleeding rag doll picked up by a stranger and carried to a nearby clinic, which sent her to Kathmandu's main trauma ward at Bir Hospital.

[...] he found only their bodies.

[...] the family sought safety from aftershocks in an open field, and waited for the helicopter they were sure would come quickly.

There were surgeries to clean their wounds, therapy to get them moving again and prostheses, built with the help of the aid group Handicap International, to be fitted.

Next to them, bamboo poles hold Buddhist prayer flags that flap in the winds that never seem to stop blowing here.