Earthquakes in Nepal 2015

The majority of our friends, family and colleagues in Nepal were very fortunate but a few were not and lives were lost.

The scale of the disaster is almost beyond comprehension.  You will all have seen the awful and very harrowing pictures on the news from Kathmandu and now, at last, some of the villages outside of the Kathmandu valley.  The human suffering just seems to go on and on.

Thanks to all the orders from customers, partners, friends and family around the world over the past few years we have been able to build new workshops and these were built strongly enough to survive this terrible disaster.  Some of the staff were inside the new workshops when the first earthquake hit and were able to get out and to safety.  Since then there have been many, many big aftershocks and at the moment it is not safe for anybody to go back inside buildings, so everybody is sheltering as best as they can outside.  The aftershocks are still going on with at least two or three strong shocks every day.

A huge number of buildings in Kathmandu and Nepal have been destroyed and thousands of lives have been lost.  In the villages outside of Kathmandu it looks like the disaster might be even worse than in the city.  In the main village that our knitters and tailors come from there is now not one house left standing.  The entire village has been destroyed.  There is nothing left.

The Nepalese government and forces together with all the foreign aid agencies are doing as much as they can in the immediate emergency after the earthquake but this is not enough.  Nepal has very little in the way of infrastructure and established services and this unfortunately means that recovery is going to be long, slow and very difficult.  People need to rebuild their lives, their houses and their communities and they cannot wait for aid money to possibly trickle down to them in the future. 

After talking to our friends and family in Nepal we think that the best way that we can help is to give aid and help directly to our knitters and tailors, who have lost everything, so that they themselves can rebuild their smashed houses and villages.  This is what they have asked for and they need to be fed and clothed and to be able to start rebuilding now.  This will in turn reach out to other communities and a new future starts to grow. 

We have started a fund that will be run directly from our knitting base in Kathmandu and will directly help our knitters and tailors together with their families and communities.  We have already started to distribute food and clothing to our knitters and we are also urgently trying to sort out shelter and building materials.  In the next few days we will update you, but we ask and pray that you can help us raise some money now rather than waiting for aid money that might never get to those who need it.  Everything will be open so everyone can see where the money is going and everything will be fully documented.   We will take lots of videos and pictures so that you can see where your money is going and see the lives that you are helping to rebuild.