A week of silence
A week after devastating floods swept through Nepal, a Toronto woman still has no word on her cousin or the three family members he was travelling with when disaster struck. Like many in Canada's Nepali diaspora, she has spent the days since combing through the internet for any scrap of information, checking Nepal police sites and missing persons databases in hopes a familiar name will finally appear.
Scouring the internet for names
With official channels slow to deliver updates, families across Canada have effectively become their own investigators. The Toronto woman described the exhausting routine of refreshing missing persons lists and police postings, hoping for any confirmation, good or bad, about her cousin's fate. That uncertainty, she said, is its own kind of torment: not knowing whether to hope or grieve.
A call for a bigger international response
As the days tick by without word, she is urging a wider international response to bolster rescue and recovery efforts on the ground in Nepal. For families watching from thousands of kilometres away, the pace of the search feels painfully slow, and every day without news raises the stakes for the people still unaccounted for.
Toronto's Nepali community feels the impact
Toronto is home to one of Canada's larger Nepali communities, and stories like this one are a reminder of how a disaster overseas can ripple through families here in Ontario. For many, the flooding in Nepal isn't a distant headline, it's a personal crisis playing out in real time, with relatives glued to phones and social media waiting for updates that haven't come.
What comes next
As search and rescue operations continue in Nepal, Canadian families are left to wait, and to push for more support from the international community. For the Toronto woman still searching for her cousin, each passing day without answers only sharpens the urgency of that call.
Source: CBC News
