A volunteer from Falmouth has described the terrors of living in quake hit Nepal and being awoken by screaming villagers as she helps deliver aid with Helston based charity Shelterbox.

Becky Maynard, who flew to the country within days of the first quake on 25 April, has spoken of her time in a country that dares not sleep, where she keeps a crude homemade early warning system beside the bed in her hotel room in Kathmandu, and sleeping in a car is preferable to a building in a city still racked with aftershocks.

Becky and her colleagues have been delivering aid to mountain communities, sometimes bunking down on the bare earth like the locals, listening to it growl and tremble with aftershocks, but said sleeping in the disaster hit villages can feel a lot safer than in the city.

She said: "The top of a building, which is where I am, is a lot better than the bottom, because if the worst happened and the building collapsed I would be under the smaller amount of rubble. I have a good sized window and an easy exit route - albeit via two fairly large jumps.

"I feel a lot more faux shocks in my room in Kathmandu, which is probably less about the physical and more about the psychological. Due to the inherent danger your senses are heightened, noises such as furniture being moved or storms rolling overhead become something else in your mind.

Becky has even gone to the lengths of rigging up her own system of checks, with two glasses next to each other on her hotel desk which clink together when the building shakes, and a half bottle of water which will ripple, allowing her to see if she is imagining the quake.

"While I was writing," she added "my early warning system kicked into action. It was only 4.4 magnitude, but it is reassuring to know that the process works."

Becky was in Nepal when a second quake hit in mid May, and the country is now mainly living under canvas, away from potentially dangerous buildings, as aftershocks still shake the land.

Becky said: "Despite the fact that these shelters are very unlikely to be damaged by aftershocks [the villagers] are understandably sensitive to the quakes. More often than not I have been awoken by villagers running out and screaming rather than by the tremor itself."

Becky, who is set to return home any day, said: "The people of Nepal... don’t have safe homes to return to. They are having to start rebuilding their lives from the ground up, and no doubt the fear they feel will continue for a very long time to come."