KARACHI, Oct 16: Col Shah Ali of the Sindh Boy Scouts has appealed to citizens to donate blankets and tents which are the most urgently needed items for quake victims.
Talking by phone from Muzaffarabad on Sunday, he said that those social organizations which having adequate experience of relief work, and the volunteers who could walk in mountainous areas, should join in the rescue work immediately.
He said that scouts had set up their base camps in various areas and were engaged in rescue and relief work in the affected areas. He said that still there were chances of life under the rubble of a school near Ghari Dupatta.
He said that there was a visible improvement in relief work and further improvement was expected in the coming days. Many injured people had been shifted from hilly areas to the base camp of Muzaffarabad, he said, adding that 70 per cent of the local population lived in remote villages on hills where a large number of injured was still waiting for relief workers and goods.
He said that more than 150 boy scouts belonging to various districts of Sindh were engaged in relief and rescue work in quake-hit areas while some 15,000 others were collecting relief goods across Sindh.
WOMEN DOCTORS WANTED: Women medical professionals, including doctors, nurses and paramedical staff, are badly needed in quake-hit areas although a large number of them, coming from various parts of the country, have already been engaged in relief work.
This was stated by Zakir Hussain, General-Secretary of the Sindh Paramedical Staff Welfare Association (SPSWA) who was among the first relief teams sent to the quake-hit areas by the government and has just returned to the city.
He said that among those providing medical treatment to the injured people, the number of women professionals appeared negligible.
He expressed the fear that many of the injured, particularly the elderly people, women and children requiring immediate medical treatment might not survive unless more medical professionals, especially women ones, were rushed to the affected areas.
The association said it had trained more than 1,000 health workers and any NGO or other organization willing to take them along to the quake-hit areas could contact it on phone numbers: 021-9215740 or 0300-9292776 (Karachi), 0300-3079834 (Hyderabad), 0300-3383259 (Mirpurkhas), 0301-3813201 (Nawabshah), and 0333-7103167 (Sukkur).—PPI
