Less than a day after arriving in Nepal, Sidney’s Haley Westra was in a remote village when Saturday’s earthquake hit.

Good thing the 18-year-old had moved on from Kathmandu, as the house in which she had spent the night there was flattened.

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You might think she would be scrambling to get home, but no, she is staying to help.

Communication with the outside world is sketchy — intermittent connections on one of the cellphones that still has juice — but here’s what she wants Victorians to know: Aid isn’t getting through to the devastated rural reaches of Nepal. They desperately need help.

The same message comes from Elli Mota, a former Victorian who now lives in the tourist mecca of Pokhara. She says it was left to her friends from the paragliding community to launch rescue missions to the hard-hit Gorkha region.

“No army, police or armed forces personnel in sight and obviously also no medical or basic survival supplies from the government or foreign aid organizations either,” the former Tourism Victoria employee wrote Thursday. “It took until Wednesday for the first helicopters to arrive in the Gorkha area to rescue severely injured people.”

That matches the description left by Claremont grad Nikki Sequeira, also in Pokhara after finding herself in the ruined villages near Gorkha.

At one point she watched rainwater pour into a makeshift two-tarp shelter under which 40 people huddled.

“The temperatures are quickly dropping, more rain is coming, thousands are without homes, some lack even shelters like this and our help is desperately needed,” she wrote in an email.

The common thread among these women: Horrified by the plight of rural Nepalese, they’re urging aid to grassroots relief efforts.

Watch this disaster unfold on television, you’ll see a lot of focus on Kathmandu and Everest, and on Canadian families overcome with relief as their sons and daughters are located and extracted unharmed. The Nepalese who are out of sight get less attention, except from people like Westra, Mota and Sequeira.

“The villagers in the mountains have no homes and no help except from the few volunteers here,” Westra wrote in a Facebook post.

She is one of four Stelly’s Secondary grads volunteering at a farm for abused and outcast women. Operated by the non-profit Mountain Fund, the farm is an hours-long hike from the village of Mankhu. Westra had been there last year as part of the Saanich Peninsula school’s Global Perspectives program, in which groups of Grade 12s travel abroad to do good works, such as building the farm’s shelter and, most recently, its school.

Having just finished a year at UVic, and heading to Camosun’s nursing program this fall, Westra decided to sign up for another six-week volunteer stint at Her Farm this summer. She left Victoria last Thursday, overnighted in Kathmandu Friday, then .… the quake hit.

Her mother, Corene Westra, was panic-stricken until she got a Facetime call from Haley in Mankhu on Saturday night.

Haley appeared frightened, had been crying. “But she was also ready to go and help,” her mother says. The 18-year-old student and Starbucks barista, an active Christian, was determined to stay and perhaps even extend her trip. Family friend Susi McMillan notes that instead of trying to flee to safety, Haley and her friends pitched in at a hospital before leaving for Her Farm.

“My daughter was born wonderful,” Corene says. “She’s soft and she’s gentle and she’s kind and she’s very intelligent.”

In her Facebook post, Haley urges people to donate to earthquake relief at mountainfund.org.

In Pokhara, Mota thinks such grassroots organizations, ones that are already on the ground, are best-equipped to get help to those who most need it. She is partial to Doctors Without Borders and KarmaFlights, the charity run by professional paragliding pilots driving relief efforts in Gorkha. Their work contrasts with the cumbersome efforts of more bureaucratic agencies. “People are frustrated over the government’s slow or even seemingly non-existing reaction to the disaster and the chaos at the airport in Kathmandu, hindering foreign aid from arriving to the country, or allowing the supplies to sit at the airport for a long time.”

Mota, who spent six years employed at Tourism Victoria and Wild Play before moving to Nepal, was getting ready to go to work in Pokhara when the earthquake struck. The shaking continued long after she dashed outside, but the city got off lightly. Mota’s six-year-old son was even able to return to school Thursday.

Also pitching in in Pokhara has been 26-year-old Sequeira, who with companions Ashleigh Brooks — a University of Victoria lab instructor — and UVic grads Rob Mackenzie and Shaun Monty set up a Backpackers For Nepal campaign to raise funds for the local Red Cross. It has brought in $8,000 so far.

What Sequeira has seen has been sobering.

“I’ve gone to villages in and around Gorkha, near the epicentre, where I’ve witnessed the destruction of homes and met people who have lost everything,” she wrote in an email Thursday. “People who are currently without a home impressed upon me their concern for communities that are more isolated and will perhaps never have the benefit of assistance from local or international organizations. I sheltered from a rain storm under a leaky tarp shared by several families who will be living there for the days and weeks to come as monsoon season approaches, unable to return to their cracked and broken homes for fear of collapse.”

Her backpacking companions have left, but Sequeira, who has been travelling in Nepal for a month, expects to stay in Pokhara for two weeks until transportation becomes easier.

For more information, see:

• mountainfund.org

• karmaflights.org

• Backpackers for Nepal on Facebook

Stelly’s school will hold a fundraising concert at 7 p.m. May 29.