AP, Nepal : With help still not reaching some isolated villages a week after Nepal’s devastating earthquake, a top international aid official said Saturday that more helicopters were needed to get assistance to the farthest reaches of this Himalayan nation.Many mountain roads, often treacherous at the best of times, remain blocked by landslides, making it extremely difficult for supply trucks to get to the higher Himalayan foothills.”We definitely need more helicopters,” Ertharin Cousin, executive director of the U.N.’s World Food Program, told The Associated Press in the village of Majuwa, in the quake-devastated Gorkha district. Aid agencies have been using Majuwa as a staging area to get supplies deeper into mountainous areas. “Even seven days in this is still very much considered the early days, because there are people we still haven’t reached. So we need helicopters to reach them.””This is one of the poorest places on Earth. If the global community walks away, the people of this country will not receive the assistance that is required for them to rebuild their lives,” she said.She said shelter was a more urgent priority at this point than food.More than 130,000 houses were destroyed in the quake, according to the U.N. humanitarian office. Near the epicenter, north of Kathmandu, whole villages were in ruins, and residents were in desperate need of temporary shelters against the rain and cold.The magnitude-7.8 earthquake killed more than 6,600 people, with the death toll continuing to rise as reports filter in from isolated areas. The U.N. has estimated the quake affected 8.1 million people – more than a fourth of Nepal’s population of 27.8 million.On Friday, Nepal’s government renewed its appeal to international donors to send tents, tarpaulins and basic food supplies, saying some of the items being sent are of little use.The government also asked donors to send money to help with relief efforts if they cannot send things that are immediately necessary.”We have received things like tuna fish and mayonnaise. What good are those things for us? We need grains, salt and sugar,” Finance Minister Ram Sharan Mahat told reporters Friday.
