Amul Thapa/KathmanduToday.com via APWarning: Your heart is about to explode, in a good way.
With so much devastation crisscrossing the globe, from Baltimore all the way to Kathmandu, it's the handful of inspiring images of great human perseverance that allow a little light to poke in through the darkness.
The death count from the catastrophic 7.8 earthquake that gutted Nepal on Saturday reached 5,825 and is only going up—so every life that was somehow spared seems to take on an almost mystical symbolism, proof that miracles still do happen. Because how else to explain these survivors' tales?
"I had very little hope that they had survived. I didn't hear any sound at all," mother of two Rasmila Awal told CNN after her 5-month-old son Sonies was pulled from the rubble of their family's collapsed home 22 hours after the earthquake. Awal recalled just having left the house when the quake hit and she watched it collapse.
Her 10-year-old daughter, Soniya, was found about two hours later—but the image of Sonies' improbably rescue instantly went viral and became a nationwide symbol of hope. Awal said that the family camped in a field next to the ruins of their house and they could hear Sonies' cries but were unable to reach him. After nearly a day of digging, a soldier from the Nepalese army pulled the baby—who had only suffered minor injuries—from the wreckage.
"When I saw the baby alive all my sorrow went," photojournalist Amul Thapa, who took the viral pic of Awal, recounted the experience to reporters. "Everyone was clapping. It gave me energy and made me smile in spite of lots of pain hidden inside me."
While the photo of Sonies won the Internet with sheer adorable-baby-combined-with-hope-and-resilience power, the latest stories, about a teenage boy and a woman in her 20s being rescued after five days trapped under collapsed buildings, have caused yet another proverbial global standing ovation.
Of course, the cheers were quite literal when Pemba Tamang (whose age has been reported as both 15 and 18) was rescued Thursday.
Hundreds of people cheered when Tang was secured on a stretcher and lifted out of the wreckage of what was a seven-story building in Kathmandu.
"He thanked me when I first approached him," police officer MP Basnet, who crawled into a gap they managed to clear out to reach Tang after he and others spent hours upon hours of digging, told reporters. "He told me his name, his address, and I gave him some water. I assured him we were near to him."
"He was under the rubble for 120 hours and it is certainly the longest we have heard anybody of being under the rubble and surviving," Lt. Libby Weiss, who's among the aid workers with a medical center set up by the Israeli Defense Forces in the Nepalese capital, told the AFP. "We understand he didn't have any food and just two jars of ghee, which he had at the time he was under the rubble."
"It's a miracle," Weiss added. "I think it's an amazing thing to see in the midst of all this calamity."
A woman, identified as Krishna Devi Khadka and described by a Nepalese army worker to the AFP as "conscious and talking," was also rescued today from the wreckage of a Kathmandu hotel, where she worked as a maid.
"It is as though she had been born again," the army member said.