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Ramesh Baniya says every single member of his staff at Everest Cuisine in Ottawa is waiting for an update about a loved one who is missing after the catastrophic flooding along the Nepal-Tibet border earlier this week.<\/p>\n
For Baniya, it’s a close friend whose family is desperately searching from him. <\/p>\n
“It’s so much pain. Every Nepalese Canadian, they feel that pain,” he said. <\/p>\n
“It’s a very horrible situation we are going through. We feel like crying. We are … in deep sorrow.”<\/p>\n
Baniya’s restaurant serves Indo-Nepalese food and acts as a gathering place of sorts for locals with ties to Nepal.<\/p>\n
“Community members living here in Ottawa, they have their relatives, friends missing, and we are hearing [those] stories,” he said.<\/p>\n
Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority says the death toll has risen to 538, while the number of missing people remained at 977 and 3,742 people have been rescued. <\/p>\n
‘Entire villages’ swept away<\/p>\n
Baniya said he spent much of the previous day watching videos of the devastating damage and had to stop because it disturbed him so much.<\/p>\n
He still had trouble sleeping that night.<\/p>\n
“It was just a matter of [a] few seconds. People were making videos and then were swept away by the floods,” he said, describing watching people try to flee from the rushing water on foot or by climbing mountains.<\/p>\n
“Entire villages, many, many houses are completely obliterated because of the flood.”<\/p>\n
PHOTOS | Before and after the floods:<\/p>\n
Baniya and his staff have already donated $1,000 to relief efforts and are continuing to collect money in a jar at his restaurant.<\/p>\n
Hanging around the dining room are posters with a simple message: “A small contribution can make a big difference.”<\/p>\n
He also helped organize a candlelight vigil scheduled for Friday at 6:30 p.m. outside Ottawa city hall.<\/p>\n
“We want to do something for our brother[s] and sister[s] back home,” said Baniya. “It’s very painful.”<\/p>\n
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Posters around Everest Cuisine in Ottawa ask for donations to help provide flood relief following the disaster along the Nepal-Tibet border. (Dan Taekema\/CBC)Everyone welcome at vigil<\/p>\n
Bishnu Chhetri, with the Nepalese Canadian Association of Ottawa, also assisted with setting up the vigil.<\/p>\n
He said there are roughly 500 families originally from Nepal living in the city, many of whom have been affected in some way by the floods.<\/p>\n
That’s why they wanted to come together \u2014 to remember those who died and anyone who is missing.<\/p>\n
“We are praying for them,” said Chhetri. “It is a very sad situation for us here in Ottawa.”<\/p>\n
Both he and Baniya said everyone is welcome to join them and take part in the vigil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 3 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":874894,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194295],"tags":[49,48,20739],"class_list":["post-874893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ottawa","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-ottawa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=874893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874893\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/874894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=874893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=874893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=874893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}