Thousands of kilometres away, Nepal’s diaspora in Qatar watches the floods unfold from their screens

For the Nepali expat community in Qatar, the catastrophic floods have brought fear and helplessness far from home as they call family, follow updates and watch familiar places change on their screens.For Nepalis living abroad, home is often carried in small things: a phone call from a parent, momo dumplings from a small pop-up in the city, or a photograph from a village. Even Nepal’s monsoon can carry a certain nostalgia; the cooler days and the familiar rhythm of a season that feels like home.There is another side to that comfort. When disaster strikes, the distance can suddenly feel much larger.The monsoon is also a season when news of flooded roads, swollen rivers and landslides becomes painfully familiar.For Nepalis living in Qatar, the floods and landslides that struck on 26 August have turned their phones into windows to a country they cannot immediately reach.Instead, checking the news, scrolling through videos and calling home to make sure family is safe have become part of an uneasy routine.When home becomes a screenChandra Bahadur Dhakal, who has spent nearly 16 years in Qatar, immediately contacted his parents after learning where the disaster had hit and recognising the area near his old village in the videos circulating online.Parts of the landscape he was still searching for in the videos were no longer there.“The houses that were there were completely washed away; nothing remained at all,” Dhakal said in an interview with Doha News.“Those impacted: where is their house now? It went under, as if it sank. The mud rose to three floors.”A Qatari Armed Forces aircraft arrived in #Nepal on Monday carrying emergency humanitarian aid for communities devastated by the flash floods that struck the country on 26 August. Provided by the @qatar_fund for Development, the aid is set to reach around 52,000 people and… pic.twitter.com/W38Bnu0H4f— Doha News (@dohanews) August 31, 2026 The bridge connecting his old village to a village in Rasuwa, almost two kilometres to the north, had been destroyed, leaving his family in the village to take a longer route behind the hills to travel to and from home.For someone who has spent almost two decades away, home can exist partly through memory: a village, a bridge, familiar roads and mountains.Then, suddenly, those same places appear on a phone screen covered in mud and debris.When Anudit Basnet, a Communications Executive at the Qatar office of a global PR company, first heard about the flooding, his reaction was almost casual.“Oh okay, it happened again,” he remembered thinking. “Like it happens every year.”Then he saw the videos.CCTV footage began circulating online, followed by videos posted by people on the ground. What first sounded like another flood back home suddenly looked drastically different.“This is horrible. It’s nothing like we have ever seen before,” Basnet, 24, told Doha News.For Basnet, watching the situation unfold from Qatar brought a different kind of helplessness.He was in high school when he volunteered in Nepal after the 2015 earthquake hit. Seeing the rescue efforts from other countries, including Qatar, brought some of those memories back.“It feels a bit suffocating,” he said. “It is bringing back a lot of flashbacks.”That feeling is not only about physical distance. Part of him wished he could be back home, working on the ground alongside volunteers.BREAKING: New footage shows absolutely horrifying scenes along the China-Nepal border amid devastating flash floods, hundreds missing, many feared dead pic.twitter.com/hwXTz8IzjP— Insider Paper (@TheInsiderPaper) August 26, 2026 Flash floods in the country are commonly triggered by heavy rainfall and, in some cases, glacial hazards.“Around 80% of Nepal’s annual rainfall falls between June and September,” Manish Shrestha, a hydrologist at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), told Doha News.“Roughly 72% of flood events occur during the monsoon season,” he added.But Shrestha said an event of this nature and scale is rare. He described the situation in Nepal as “grim”, with entire villages in communities including Syafrubesi and Betrawati Bazar buried beneath debris.According to Sher Muhammad, a cryosphere specialist at ICIMOD, satellite, drone and other imagery indicate that the immediate trigger was not rainfall.“The immediate trigger was a very large rock and ice avalanche from the northern side of the Langtang Lirung massif, where a big chunk of glacier ice of over 1 km together with underlying bedrock detached at around 5,000–5,200 metres elevation,” Muhammad told Doha News.This avalanche descended roughly 2,000 metres into the Lhende Khola. One hazard then became another: the rock-and-ice avalanche entered the river system, carrying sediment and water downstream in a debris-rich flood.When distance becomes a networkFor Hira Kumari Bohara, who left Nepal in 2021 to work as a waitress in Qatar, calling her family is a constant routine. Though her family lives away from the affected area, the panic set in, and she wanted to hear that they were safe.“These kinds of incidents bring a kind of fear that makes you uneasy,” Kumari said with her eyes shut, finding the right words to describe her feeling.“It’s like the soul shakes when you hear this. You’re away from home, and you get all these scenarios in your head,” she told Doha News in an interview.When that fear settles in, staying connected becomes its own way of responding.Across the diaspora, distance can also pull the Nepali community abroad closer together, creating its own network for information and support.“Nepal actually has a very young diaspora that is abroad, in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and so on,” Basnet said. “Having a very strong international community is kind of a network that I rely on for most of my information.”For those following the disaster from abroad, however, understanding what is happening on the ground can be difficult, particularly when the hazards themselves are difficult to predict.When warnings cannot come fast enoughWhile weather forecasting has improved significantly, Nepal’s geography makes it difficult to predict exactly what will happen in a particular region and issue timely warnings.“In a mountainous region like Nepal, where communities are spread across difficult and remote terrain, reaching everyone with timely information can be a challenge,” Shrestha said.The ICIMOD hydrologist added that communities had anywhere from a few minutes to several hours of warning, depending on their location.“The government also sent more than 679,000 SMS alerts to downstream communities,” Shrestha said.The challenge is even greater around smaller rivers and streams, where hazards can transform quickly.Intense rainfall can trigger a landslide; debris can block a river; that blockage can fail and create another flood, sometimes within hours and sometimes within minutes.The latest disaster presented an even greater challenge due to a rock-and-ice avalanche.Scientists can monitor changes in glaciers, slopes and rivers, but predicting exactly when a large section of rock or ice will detach remains extremely difficult.“We do not yet fully understand why this particular section of rock and glacier ice failed at that particular moment,” Muhammad, an ICIMOD cryosphere specialist, told Doha News.That uncertainty is felt differently from thousands of kilometres away, where every alert, video and message from home can become the closest connection to what is happening there.For Chandra Bahadur Dhakal, that distance will become smaller.Travelling to Nepal soon, he hopes to see his family and feel the familiarity of his village for the first time in two years, a home that may look different from the one he left 16 years ago.