Among those returning to Nepal are adventurers like Australian photographer Athena Zelandonii, who is trekking again to attend a ceremony of remembrance on Monday in Langtang village, obliterated by a huge rockfall that took the lives of 285 locals and foreigners.
They will be remembered at the memorial event where, starting at 11:56 a.m., the name of each victim will be read out.
"There was no question of not coming back," Zelandonii, 26, told in the capital Kathmandu.
Part of a group of people who searched for loved ones or themselves lived through the disaster, Zelandonii survived an avalanche on the mountain slopes above Langtang, but was stranded for days by the rockfall.
Still missing in the Langtang area is American Dawn Habash, a 57-year-old yoga instructor from Augusta, Maine, who was trekking in Nepal for the fourth time.
Son Khaled and daughter Yasmine worked shifts to try and find out about their mother after the earthquake - all they could find out was that she was last seen walking downhill toward Langtang just before the earthquake.
Both of them and Dawn`s brother Randy are in Nepal for the anniversary, and hope that at least her body can be found.
"Because we need that closure," said Khaled. "Sometimes I still get these lightning-bolt thoughts – what if? And that’s not healthy."
Of 181 foreigners who died in the earthquake or are still missing, 63 were in Langtang.
Villager Kartok Lama, 30, said locals had already marked the anniversary of the quake by the Tibetan calendar that they follow. They said prayers in a hut because Langtang`s two gompas, or Buddhist temples, had been destroyed.
"Almost everyone from the village is back; people are rebuilding homes and hotels, and there is work going on in the fields," she told Reuters. "We want the tourists to come back."
Monday`s Langtang memorial will be preceded by national commemorations on Sunday - the quake anniversary by the Nepali calendar - at the site of Kathmandu`s historic Dharahara Tower that collapsed. There will be a candlelit vigil that night and three days of national mourning.
But the commemoration will be low-key in a country where one in seven people still live in makeshift homes, mostly tin shelters that dot the countryside by the rubble of buildings devastated by the quake.
For many Nepalis it`s been a lost year of political bickering over a new constitution, a blockade of the Indian border by its opponents and the failure to spend $4.1 billion in aid to rebuild, pledged by foreign donors. Tourism, which accounts for 9 percent of the economy, is down.
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