Dubai-Based Nepali Bus Driver Gives Up Long-Awaited Dashain Trip Home to Support Flood Victims
Shanti Kumari Bhandari had been saving for her first Nepal trip since 2021. When the floods hit, her Dashain air-ticket money went to the victims instead.
By Nepalese Events Australia Editorial
Published: 2026-09-30T06:30:00.000000Z
Category: Nepal Flood Disaster
Every diaspora has its sacrifices; few capture them as precisely as the story Gulf News told this month. Shanti Kumari Bhandari, a Nepali expatriate working in Dubai as a double-decker tourist bus driver, gave up the money she'd saved for her long-awaited Dashain trip home — to send it to flood victims instead.
The story
Bhandari hadn't been home to Nepal since 2021 — five years of working in the UAE, saving toward the trip every Dubai Nepali worker knows: the Dashain return, the tika received rather than given, the family reunion that the whole migrant arrangement is meant to make worthwhile. She had the ticket money saved.
Then the August floods hit — the disaster that devastated the Bhotekoshi region and, per Gulf News's report, prompted her decision: the airfare went to the victims. The trip she had waited five years for would wait longer.
Why this story matters beyond one person
Bhandari's choice is the diaspora condition distilled: the UAE's Nepali community is built on exactly this class of worker — the drivers, hospitality staff, labourers and service workers whose remittances keep households running back home. When the floods hit, the entire community faced versions of the same calculation she made public: help at distance, or go home at the moment you're most needed and least able to afford it. She chose the money — which is to say, she chose the more useful help — and the story resonated precisely because every reader in her position understood the cost of that choice.
It also res the season's other stories: the remittance campaigns, the consulate's lamp-lighting, the Dashain preparations — all of it happening inside a community where the Dashain trip home is the year's most emotionally loaded purchase, and this year it's competing with disaster relief for the same dirhams.
Follow the community's stories on the UAE desk.
An unusual job, a familiar sacrifice
There's a secondary detail in Bhandari's story that UAE readers noticed: a Nepali woman driving Dubai's double-decker tourist buses is itself uncommon — the city's tourism-transport workforce is overwhelmingly male, and Nepali women in the Gulf workforce more often land in hospitality, retail and domestic work. That visibility is part of why Gulf News picked the story up: the sacrifice was universal, but the person making it was distinctive enough to carry a feature.
Her five-year absence from Nepal also reflects a pattern the community knows well: for workers on annual-leave cycles, Dashain is the one trip that competes with every other family obligation — the weddings, emergencies and funerals that claim the same leave days. Choosing to spend the airfare on relief is, in that economy, the most expensive charitable donation a Dubai-d worker can make — not the money itself, but the reunion foregone.
None of this makes her decision lesser — if anything, the opposite. Stories like Bhandari's are the reason the community's flood response has weight: not institutional pledges, but thousands of individual calculations made the same way, quietly, by people whose margins are thin enough that the donation costs something real.
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