By Stephanie Garnaut
Two years ago, at the age of 20, Perth woman Ballantyne Forder found herself looking after 16 orphaned children during the devastating Nepal earthquakes.
She huddled with them in a field for four days as they watched buildings fall down around them and waited for help.
Ms Forder hasn't seen or heard from the children since. But she's travelling back to Nepal to track them down.
"Two weeks ago I woke up and I thought 'oh my gosh, I'm ready to go back now' ... so that's what I'm going to do," she said.
Ms Forder wants to find the orphaned children she took care of during the 2015 Nepal earthquake.
"For two years it's been agonising me, it's kept me up at night.
"I haven't been able to sleep, eat, it's been a constant battle of wanting to get back but I just knew if I went back any earlier I would have crumbled because I wasn't ready. I had to combat everything I saw, everything I felt."
The magnitude 7.8 earthquake killed almost 9,000 people, and Ms Forder's family in Perth waited desperately to hear from her.
On the morning of the earthquake, she was travelling to what would be the epicentre of the earthquake when she had a "gut instinct" that she should change her plans and visit an orphanage.
Four of the Nepalese orphans that Ms Forder cared for.Credit: Ballantyne Forder
She was at church with the orphans, most aged between 4 and 6, when the earthquake struck.
"I just thought, 'I've got to get the kids'. Trying to move as the ground is shaking and cracking open and you just hear all these buildings surrounding this little brick church just crushing and just taking lives," she said.
Ms Forder comforting some of the orphans in the field where they stayed for four days.Credit: Ballantyne Forder
"I just thought 'what am I going to do? How am I going to look after 16 kids'?
"We ran as the ground was cracking towards us... we just walked through death, pretty much."
We just walked through death, pretty much.
Ms Forder led the children to a field where she set up a piece of tarpaulin on sticks as shelter and sang songs to distract them.
They fought rain, hail and storms and felt regular aftershocks.
"Every three hours pretty much the aftershocks would happen and we were overlooking a field of Kathmandu valleys and so a building would crash and you would just hear screams," she said.
"And these little children are seeing that."
They had limited food and no water, but somehow "didn't get thirsty and didn't get hungry".
"It was just complete survival mode and I haven't heard anything since," Ms Forder said.
"Two years is a lot in the lives of someone living in a poverty stricken country, so yeah I have to go back and help."
Ms Forder is concerned that the children could be the victims of human trafficking, which she says has become a bigger problem in Nepal since the earthquakes as traffickers take advantage of vulnerable children.
She plans to do everything possible to track them down.
"I'm going to show up at doorsteps and ask around and hopefully the right people will come into my path to help me," she said.
"I know I will find them, whether dead or alive."
Ms Forder is trying to raise funds for her trip, in particular so that her sister Amanda, who is a nurse, can come along and check the children's health.
You can find more information at their crowdfunding page.