How Nepal is Learning To Cope With the Psychological Toll of Its Missing

Photos of the Rasuwa flood missing line the walls of the Teaching Hospital, Tribhuvan University. Credit: Brandon Kohrtby Diwash Gahatraj (kathmandu)Monday, October 12, 2026Inter Press ServiceKATHMANDU, October 12 (IPS) - Nearly three decades ago, in the final stretch of Nepal’s civil war, Dr Brandon Kohrt sat with parents whose sons had been conscripted as child soldiers and never returned. Nobody could tell them what had happened, whether their sons were alive somewhere, whether they were dead, or even where to begin looking. That absence of an answer, Kohrt says, never really left those families. It is the same absence now facing thousands of households across Nepal, after catastrophic floods swept away entire communities.On August 26, floods and landslides tore down the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli river valleys in Nepal’s Rasuwa district, killing well over a thousand people and leaving thousands more missing, one of the deadliest natural disasters in the country’s recent history.Kohrt has spent nearly 25 years in Nepal, long enough to watch the country move through this same unresolved grief again and again, first during that war, then after a devastating earthquake, and now, once ...