Jigmet Yountas, a 20-year-old Buddhist nun, usually spends her days meditating and chanting at the Naro Photang Puspahari temple in Shey, 15 kilometres from Ladakh?s main town of Leh. These days, after the cloudburst of August 6 that choked Leh and its surrounding villages in slush, Jigmet wakes up to a different routine.
She now wakes up at 4 a.m. and by 5.50 a.m., goes into prayer for two hours. After a modest breakfast, Jigmet and the other nuns leave for the affected villages. For the next eight hours or so, Jigmet stands in the sometimes knee-deep slush, shovelling and scouring for anything that the debris might have swallowed?sometimes it?s a body, at other times it?s a trunk, a photograph, pieces of lives torn apart in the floods. The slush is deep at places, sometimes going down six feet. But Jigmet knows her way now. At 5.30 pm., she heads back to the temple for two hours of prayer. Post dinner, Jigmet retires into her room for more prayers.
On August 6, the water had rushed down, flattening everything in its way?trees, cars, trucks, buses, houses, schools, boulders.
?We do special prayers every morning and evening for the peace and prosperity of Ladakh. During the day, we help with relief work. The first five days, a lot of people had to be taken out of the debris: some dead, some injured and in a state of shock,? she says, gently resting her spade. Today, she and the other nuns are removing debris from a house in Shey.
Since August 6, Jigmet and 128 other nuns from the temple have helped in relief work in Choglamsar (the worst-affected village), Shey, and at the Sonam Norboo Memorial Government Hospital in Leh.
?Many of the people here have been separated from their families. There are several people admitted in the hospital with no one to look after them. We do prayers for them and make sure they are not alone. We take food, water and other necessary things,? says
Jigmet, a follower of the Drukpa school of Buddhism.
?The disaster in Ladakh only tells us that pain and suffering do not discriminate as long as you live in this world. We see it as a great teaching of impermanence in life and sufferings of the world,? she says.