Mark Rosenbaum was sitting in his Kathmandu apartment just before noon Sunday when the mammoth 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck.
Rosenbaum, a 47-year-old Northern Illinois University professor teaching at the Kathmandu University of Management for a semester as a Fulbright Scholar, sprinted outside unharmed.
“I’m fine,” he said Monday night local time. “But I don’t represent the majority of the population.”
The Naperville resident said this scenario had been in the back of his mind since he arrived in January, when the U.S. Embassy warned him that he was traveling to an earthquake zone.
Rosenbaum said his three-level apartment building in a more modern area of the city suffered some structural damage, but other buildings in the complex—one frequented by Westerners—were largely unharmed because they were reinforced.
“The lower-income individuals who live in homes with bricks that are not reinforced are now sleeping in parks,” he said.
Despite the massive quake, more than 4,000 reported deaths, assorted aftershocks and other chaos, Rosenbaum said he hopes to stay until his semester ends in June.
“The university is officially closed this week,” he said. “If conditions improve…as long as I have adequate food, water and electricity, I don’t plan to leave.”
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That remains to be seen.
He said his complex’s water comes in via tanker trucks, and those trucks cannot be filled without electricity.
“Right now, we’ve got about two days’ left of water,” he said.
Rosenbaum emphasized that he did not feel in danger and that his situation is not like that of many Nepalis who are suffering.
“I don’t represent the majority of the population,” he said.
The Embassy outfitted him with an emergency survival kit for such a situation, which includes a tent, iodine pills for water and dried food.
It’s an option he hasn’t had to tap yet.
Embassy officials have told him to come there if conditions deteriorate.
He said each aftershock makes him want to run, but he is grateful he has reliable shelter.
He said the brick buildings that crumbled in “puffs of smoke,” reinforce how basic things like sound infrastructure are taken for granted.
He had yet to see any looting or price gouging, and the streets seem calm. He hears planes flying.
Rosenbaum has received two Fulbright awards in the past, and was a scholar in Cambodia in 2009, according to NIU.
NIU also has 14 Nepalese exchange students this semester, according to spokesman Paul Palian.
Officials with the international affairs division have been helping those students contact their families, Palian said.
The students have made contact with their families and everyone appears to be OK, he said Monday.
“Things were bad before,” Rosenbaum said of life there after the earthquake. “Things were difficult. It’s just become a little harder.”
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