Nepal desperation grows in areas still waiting for aid

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• JUDY WOODRUFF:

  The magnitude of the devastation in Nepal following a massive earthquake is still largely unknown in some of the most remote parts of the country.

  Jonathan Miller of Independent Television News traveled Northeast from Kathmandu to the town of Bahrabise, where he met desperate survivors who have yet to see any aid at all.

• JONATHAN MILLER:

  Seismologists say the tectonic shockwave unleashed by the quake had the power of 20 thermonuclear weapons.

  Exactly 100 miles east of the epicenter, that shockwave hits the towns and the villages of Botakose River Valley with deadly ferocity. As we drove north, the seismic scars became more and more evident. Those who live in these Himalayan foothills have had the foundations of their very lives shaken. The sickly stench of death blew in through our windows.

  After three hours and 20 miles short of the Chinese frontier, we were stopped in our tracks by a landslide. It was the end of the road. As we watched the first efforts to clear it, a cluster of people emerged. Such was their desperation to get to our side, they charged through. They'd come from Tatopani, a Nepali town right on the Tibetan border, and along with their few scant possessions and blankets, they brought with them stories of the world they had just left behind.

• MAN:

  All around, all were dead bodies. They're smelling. No tents. No medicine.

• JONATHAN MILLER:

  And this is the haven Tatopani's quake refugees have escaped to. Parts of Bahrabise lie wrecked and abandoned, a ghost town laid waste on a Saturday lunchtime.

  Well, if news from the Tibet border villages is terrible, it's pretty bad around here too. We're in the largest town of Bahrabise, again, just a few kilometers from the Chinese frontier. And it too has been visited by death and destruction. Yet nobody I have talked to up here has said they have had any outside help at all.

  They have all heard promises from their government, but four days after the earthquake, nothing at all has arrived. Twice today, we saw helicopters, one of them circling briefly. Local people say none has landed. The desperation of some contrasts with the stoicism of those picking through the rubble of the wrecked homes. For those in this aid-free earthquake zone, there is only one maxim: God helps those who help themselves.