Your donations hard at work – thank you

Posted on November 9, 2026 by Angus Mccoll - feature stories

At 8:20am, Wednesday 26 August, a chunk of glacier breaks away from the north face of Nepal’s Langtang Lirung and crashes hundreds of metres into the valley below and into the Lende River, the border river between Nepal and Tibet. This generates a 9-metre wall of water travelling at 180km/hour that smashes into the border-crossing community of Gyirong Port on the China–Nepal border at the Lende’s junction with the Trishuli River. Multi-story buildings busy with workers and tourists are swept away. This wave of water and debris continued down the Trishuli River into Nepal causing an unimaginable level of destruction to anything in its path, including river-side communities, without warning, without a chance. An overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe unfolds.

On Saturday 29 August the FHC Committee held an emergency meeting. While Batase was not impacted by the disaster, the committee decided to support Som’s suggestion to go there in person to help. At this stage he had no clear plan but to offer space in the FHC Hostel to take in refugees from the flooded communities.
By Monday 31 August, a dedicated webpage started accepting your donations from a mail-out to all of our friends. Instantly the money was wired through to FHC in Nepal.
Som arrives in Kathmandu on Thursday 3 September and immediately consults with people and authorities on the ground there. Saturday 5 September they embark on their first mission – load up multiple trucks with food and cooking utensils and head for effected communities. Helping him are young men and women who have been supported by FHC in the past, volunteering with volunteer staff from Take on Nepal.

Our teams aren’t doing this alone. They are co-ordinating with the Nepalese Army and the Nepalese ‘National Volunteer Force’ (NVF), which is a group of dedicated young volunteers designed to assist the public during natural disasters and crises.

To date, 1,453 people are dead and over 6,000 (including 34 Australians) are still missing.