Eight-year-old Zoyal Ghale reunited with his mother on Friday after she thought that he and his brother had both been swept away from their school in the recent deadly Nepal floods. How he braved the odds to reunite with his family is a story of sheer resilience.
When the sudden flood and landslide struck his school in Rasuwa, Zoyal fled into a nearby forest with a friend and climbed trees to escape the rising waters. Despite sustaining a broken leg and facial injuries, he clung on until he was rescued and airlifted to a hospital.
He was eventually traced and reunited with his mother, Matti Maya Tamang, in Kathmandu after a news report helped track down his family.
The boy was airlifted from the northern district of Rasuwa, and the authorities said that he was alone when he was found.
"At the fourth place too, my children's names were not on the list...I had come to accept that both my children were no more," Tamang told Reuters.
According to UNICEF, at least 17,000 children have been affected by floods across Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading districts north of Kathmandu.
With the death toll crossing 600 and around 2,500 people missing across Nepal and Tibet, young Tamang was among the lucky few who made it back alive.
The boys had gone to school on Wednesday morning in the school vehicle, while Tamang had begun weaving at home. She recalled hearing a sound like an earthquake.
The floods were triggered when the lower part of the glacier near the Langtang Lirung mountain peak collapsed on Wednesday and tumbled into the valley floor below.
"I could see everything was being swept away," Tamang said. "I thought my children were getting swept away too."
"You could not understand where the school was, where the market was," she said. "There was only water, stones and mud everywhere."
