From Remote Villages To Mt. Everest Base Camp, COVID Hits Nepal Hard

When health workers finally arrived last month in the remote village of Namanta, up in the forested foothills of Nepal's Himalayas, residents hid in their homes.

They'd been advised not to welcome strangers, who might spread the coronavirus. But it was already too late. Out of 64 households in the village, 30 of them had someone who was ill.

Those individuals hadn't been able to get tested though: The nearest coronavirus testing facility was a 3-hour walk away. Nobody who was sick could make it that far.

So as residents huddled in their homes, many of them coughing, they were frightened by the surprise arrival of strangers in surgical masks. One villager made a phone call.

"They called us and said, 'There are these new people in town. They say they're here to help. What should we do?'" recalls Srijana Karki, the South Asia regional director for World Neighbors, a development charity based in Oklahoma.