Gopal Aryal, Nepal

People see broken houses, they don’t see broken hearts.

I was pretty sure that the house is gonna fall, and I’m gonna die. You don’t see anything else ahead, you just run. And then you really feel, “Man, now what’s gonna happen? What’s next?”

I was doing theater to deal with many social issues, cultural issues, and then we designed this project with Americares, together, to help people who are facing psychological trauma because of this earthquake.

You don’t know where to begin from—where to start from.

People still think that the problem is the physical thing that they lose and they don’t have, but the problem is the mental health they have lost.

The play itself is a healing process.

People laugh, and in this way, take their emotions out; they have been crying, and they understand what a psychosocial problem is—what mental health is.

We stop the play in the middle, and we invite the audience to deal with that issue.

So, the audience become actors, and they try to solve the mental health issues that a character has.

We’re getting people that want to talk to us, and there was a woman—she said, “You should take this play to the villages.”

And I said, “Why do you think so?”

And then she started crying, and she said, “I lost my sister in this earthquake. I lost hope. I thought, ‘It’s only me,’ and now I can see there are so many people. It’s not just me, this happened to them. There is light.”

And the most important line that she said is, “People see broken houses, they don’t see broken hearts.”

Gopal Aryal
Theater practitioner
Nepal