The former dean of UC Davis Graduate School of Management and his wife are among the thousands of people missing following last week’s flash floods at the Nepal-China border.
Hanumantha Rao Unnava had recently retired from his position as dean when he decided to go on a holiday to Nepal and Tibet with his wife Vasundhara, who lectures at UC Davis, according to their daughter Vaasavi Unnava.
The couple, who are US citizens, had described the holiday as a “trip of a lifetime,” Vaasavi told CNN. “The plan was to cross the border from Nepal into Tibet the day that the floods hit.”
When Vaasavi heard about the disaster last week, she texted her father but the message failed to deliver. “That’s when I realized something was really wrong,” she said.
Despite her best efforts, Vaasavi has been unable to make contact with her parents, or receive any information on their condition.
“The Nepali president went on the news and he said a lot of the survivors are being held in this area called Dhunche, that does not have cell service,” Vaasavi said. “But it’s been six days, and so like the fact that no government in the world has been trying to make sure that coverage is getting there, so we can also ping survivor cell phones, is really disconcerting.”
After learning that the Nepali police have been asking families of loved ones to provide DNA samples to help identify people, Vaasavi called the US State Department to ask them about the protocol.
“The person on the other end of the line said that they didn’t know that the Nepali police had actually said that,” Vaasavi said.
In the meantime, all Vaasavi can do is plead for more information. “We have no idea like where the [rescue] operations are even going on,” Vaasavi said. “My parents were kind of in the epicenter where everything really went wrong in Nepal.”