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Desperate villagers wait for aid

Rajeeb Sah sits alone on the front steps of what used to be his home, staring blankly into the distance.

Buried under the rubble behind him are the bodies of his wife, sister, two-year-old daughter and his three-year-old son.

The young TV repairman has spent days trying to dig them out with his bare hands but so far he has found no trace of them.

"It is hopeless for us," Rajeeb tells me in a hollow voice betraying the depth of his grief. "I have nothing left."

_The West Australian _came across Rajeeb in the mountain village of Melamchi, about a 3½ hour drive on bumpy roads north from Kathmandu.

It is a spectacular drive through picturesque valleys but the beauty cannot mask the despair of the thousands who live out here.

Remote Melamchi has suffered more than most, losing about 300 of its residents when the 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit just after lunchtime on Saturday.

Although many of the newer buildings in the village survived, the older ones crumbled in seconds, crushing their inhabitants under tonnes of rubble. And then - as survivors gathered in the streets - landslides sent boulders the size of small cars raining down from the hills.

A twisted truck that was knocked on to its side by one of those rocks lay just a few metres from Rajeeb's home.

It serves as a reminder of the destructive power that was unleashed on this village, but also of the continuing threat that locals are living under.

As we walk the streets surveying the damage, people come up wanting to share their stories.

Sagar Ki's home is still standing but he and his family have been sleeping in a tent down at the local football field because they are too scared to be indoors.

Resting up against the front steps of their house is a giant rock almost 2m in diameter that skidded down the mountain like a bowling ball.

"Yes, I am lucky," Sagar said. "If it had hit my house, who knows."

Although everyone here seems to have lost someone, their grief is turning to anger as they wait for help from their Government.

Rajeeb echoes the frustration of many here who cannot understand why aid has not started arriving, almost a week after the tragedy unfolded.

"Why is no one helping us," he asks.

Army helicopters fly overhead every half an hour or so, but no food, tents or other supplies have arrived in Melamchi.

The reality though is that with so many other villages crying out for assistance, getting help to everyone is taking time.

Many of the roads in the region also remain closed because of landslides and there are not enough helicopters to go around.

Back in Kathmandu, misery is also in abundance.

In the middle of one of the worst-hit suburbs, we come across a team of Chinese search-and-rescue experts working alongside the local police and army searching for bodies in the rubble.

Having just finished at one house, a police officer approaches the Chinese team's leader Ho Chen with a new assignment just a few streets away.

Trapped in the basement of a partially collapsed home is a 30-year-old mother and her eight-year-old son.

Chen and his team of volunteers - who have paid their own way to get here - use fibre-optic cameras to peer deep into the rubble.

With four storeys of the house still threatening to collapse at any moment, the decision is made that it is too dangerous to dig.

"The reality is there is a golden window of about 72 hours - we know that is roughly how long a person can survive," Chen tells us.

"It has been six days now, we don't expect to find survivors any more."

Across the city, heavy rain has been making the recovery effort even harder. For the thousands of Nepalese who have taken up residence in tent cities around the capital, the rain just adds insult to injury.

The army is running the camps, digging latrines and providing clean water.

And volunteers from local schools have been bringing hot food - the arrival of their trucks quickly attracting big crowds.

We found 20-year-old student Niraj Bajracharya huddling with his extended family under an improvised tent made from tarpaulins, trying to keep dry.

Like so many here, they have no homes to go back to and have no idea how long they will be stuck in these camps.

"At least here it is safe and we have food and water," Niraj says.

For so many here, he finds it hard to imagine how life will ever return to some sort of normal.