ULM community helps five internationals recover from devestating tragedy

Babel Basnet was enjoying a quiet evening on Sunday, March 4, in his McGuire Street home. He was cooking on his stovetop when he smelled smoke. He knew he hadn’t burned his food, and when he turned around, he saw his living room was full of smoke.

Soon, Basnet and his four roommates, all ULM students from Nepal, would see their American home, as well as most of what they owned, go up in flames.

Basnet rushed into the hall and saw the smoke was billowing from his bedroom. His laptop, which was sitting on his bed, was on fire. The fire spread from the laptop onto his comforter and, before long, the bed itself.

“I was panicked,” Basnet admits. Without thinking, he grabbed his laptop and tried to throw it out of the window. But the computer burned his hand – badly.

Cringing with pain, Basnet rushed into a bedroom where his roommate, Sudil Shrestha, was napping. He woke him up and then they woke up another roommate, Parash Parajuli.

Parajuli and Shrestha immediately began grabbing their international papers and passports that are required for them to be in the country. Meanwhile, a still-shaken Basnet was trying to fill a plastic trashcan with water to put out the fire.

“I didn’t even think about the fire extinguisher,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking very clearly at all.”

He abandoned the trashcan idea and ran to a neighbor’s house for help. He tried to call 911, but he couldn’t because of his burned hand. Parajuli and Shrestha made two trips into the house. They were able to save some documents and a computer. By the third try,the fire had become too large. The roommates could only watch as they surrendered their home to its fate.

Aftermath

es for emergency responders to get to the house. An ambulance took Basnet to the hospital to treat his hand. Doctors told him he had second-degree burns, and his hand would take at least six weeks to heal.

By the time Basnet returned, his right hand now a bandaged club, he and all four of his roommates watched as the fire fighters finished extinguishing the flames. Two and a half hours after the the fire started, the five roommates were able to enter the house to see what could be salvaged.

There wasn’t much.

The brick frame hides the true extent of the damage from the road. Every window is blacked out or broken. The inside is gutted and charred. Ash covers the back porch. A melted bicycle sits in a corner. The attic’s rafters can be seen from the yard.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Naba Amgain, who was away from his home when the fire started but made it back to search the ruins. “We took what we could, but there wasn’t much.”

The Monroe fire department is still investigating the incident, and no official cause has been determined.

The roommates called their friend Rahul Dham, a fellow Nepali student. Basnet, Shrestha, Parajuli, Amgain and the fifth roommate, Nabaraj Kandel, have been staying with Dham since the accident. Right now, six of them are living in a two bedroom apartment.

“We make it work,” said Amgain.

Nepal is more than 8,000 miles from Monroe. ULM has 63 Nepali students on campus, the most of any single country outside of the United States. Having such a large network has helped them deal with the crisis.

Dham said, “We’ve been best friends for years. We’re like brothers. Of course they could stay here.”

After Dham, one of their next calls was to Mara Loeb, head of the International Student Organization.

“It’s a community that doesn’t have a lot, but they know how to share and support each other,” Loeb said. “It’s a very caring, close-knit community.”

The ISO has been receiving monetary donations from students every day since the fire. The Red Cross, Student Government, First Baptist Church of West Monroe and individual colleges on campus are working with the ISO on donations they’ve received.

“The first people who came in to donate money were people who were not in the best financial situation themselves,” said Loeb, “but sometimes when you don’t have much you understand having nothing a little better

Loeb said they really need laptops to continue with school; though, she understands those may be hard to come by. Though the donations have exceeded $500, that’s still a long way from buying one, much less four, laptops.

Life goes on

Their basic needs are met, but the future is still uncertain for the students. They did not have renter’s insurance, so they may have to rely on donations to get through.

Basnet will likely have to withdraw from the University this semester because he can’t write and has no supplies to continue his studies. The others intend to finish.

Basnet also faces the added difficulties of treating his hand. The law requires international students to get health insurance, but Loeb was unclear about what happens if he is forced to resign. He said he does worry about how he’s going to pay his medical bills.

He also lost all of his international documents, so he is trapped in America.

Still, the roommates keep an upbeat outlook on the situation. They take their tragedy in stride, day by day deciding what to do next.

People always ask what they need, they say. Dham jokingly answers “a house.” The roommates make it very clear they are nothing but grateful for the help they’ve received.

Past the stoic exterior, deeper healing may take time. Basnet said at night he can still hear the fire raging.

“Smells scare him, like when we cook,” Dham said.

Basnet said he’d probably think of the fire every time he smelled fish cooking on a stove.