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Woman with Warren ties survived Nepal earthquake thanks to selflessness of people of Tsum Valley
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
Donna Tolley and the 17 other massage therapists from 12 countries she traveled with in Nepal starting in April went to the South Asian country planning to offer therapeutic massage to the people of the high Himalayan villages.
“Many of the people here have no access to medicine and work very hard their entire lives in the mountains and have a lot of chronic pain and injuries,” said Tolley, whose mother, stepfather and grandmother live in Warren.
They are her mother, Randi Palmer; Randi’s husband, Dennis Csiszer; and her grandmother, Donnagene Palmer.
Little did the massage therapists know, it would be they who would need help, as a magnitude-7.8 earthquake hit the country April 25, stranding them in a small village in the Tsum Valley called Burji for eight days. The quake killed more than 8,000 people. Fortunately for the group, they were in an open field when it hit, several weeks after their arrival in the country.
“We watched boulders crashing down the mountains around us and enjoyed the beauty of Mother Nature and didn’t realize the magnitude of damage all around us,” she said.
They had intended to be in the town of Chhekomparo at that time, but circumstances delayed their departure from the town of Nile. Lucky for them that they were not in Chhekomparo, because the town was “nearly completely destroyed,” Tolley said.
The group was trapped in Burji because the trail out was impassable because of landslides and cracks in the earth. But a man named Dhawa gave the group shelter and lunch.
“Thanks to the incredibly generous people of the Tsum Valley, we were taken in, given a tent which 15 people shared, and were fed for the eight days we were trapped in the village of Burji,” she said.
Communications were challenging, so it took two days for members of the group to make phone calls to tell their families that they were alive. Some family members braced for the possibility that they were among the dead, Tolley said.
But another striking observation in the days that followed was the selflessness of the people who helped them survive, Tolley said.
“When we asked them how much food they had, since the trail to hike food in was inaccessible due to landslides and cracks in the earth, they said they had food for two weeks. And there was no second thought on their part that we could all eat. We were fed and housed by people who literally had lost their homes and supplies and businesses and pathway to safety and food,” she said.
The group was determined to help the people of the Tsum Valley, so its members walked to Chhekomparo to help with the rebuilding process, but “they told us it was too unsafe. They did not want us to risk our lives,” she said, adding that aftershocks made the stone-stacked structures highly unstable.
“They asked us to simply spread the word about their situation,” she said of the need for money to buy tents, food and building materials.
The group was removed from the village by helicopter May 3 and 4, and she’s back in the United States now.
But Tolley, 29, who grew up in Hudson, Ohio, is helping the people she met and who helped her by establishing a way for people to donate.
One of the simplest is to use PayPal and direct the funds to nepalneedslove@gmail.com.