Oftentimes, museums come to the forefront in terms of imparting younger generation with the basics of a country\city’s culture and practices. Not just the intangible cultural heritage, they can be used to portray aspects of few tragic incidents, like the 2015 Earthquake. With this idea in mind, plans to build ‘People’s Museum of Earthquake’ have been initiated in the valley.
With the team of four including activist, scholar and two researchers they formed a group. This group was involved in fund-raising, relief management and academic researches after the Gorkha Earthquake 2015. About the concept of the People’s Museum, Brabim Kumar KC, a member of the group expressed, “After two years, we decided to collaborate to construct a ‘People’s Museum’ so that the future generation can remember and learn from the devastation caused by the lack of preparedness.”
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Adding further, KC said, “We are doing three different activities in parallel: building a master plan, deciding our approach for resource mobilization and undergoing site review in city areas.” He also pointed out that the panel had been undergoing formal and informal exchanges with experts, including manager of Patan Museum, representatives of UN Habitat and museology field experts.
The organizers hope to document different aspects of 2015 Earthquake, not just the tragic aspect of it, but also how we as a nation coped with the tragedy. This could serve to entice curiosity among students and adults alike. They also hope to make it a space where visitors could experience an artificially induced shaking of earthquake. “Trainings provided so far to people in terms of earthquake preparedness would make more sense if they got to practice ‘Duck, Cover and Hold’ first hand”, said Swosti Rajbhandari Kayastha, guest speaker at the event.
Rajbhandari Kayastha is one of the few foreign-educated museologists of the country. She cited the concept of three museums around the world—Holocaust Museum of Berlin, Beichuan Qiang Autonomous County and National September 11 Memorial & Museum of New York-- to support the construction of ‘People’s Museum of Earthquake’ in Nepal. All the aforementioned museums were built after few years of tragic happenings, which to her, was a perfect reason why the team after two years should be thinking about building a museum.
