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| October 31, 2005 | Monday | Ramzan 26, 1426 |
Local donations not reaching Balakot
BALAKOT, Oct 30: Majority of relief camps set up in various cities across the country for collecting donations in the name of quake-affected people have no existence in the flattened city of Balakot.
The homeless people of the devastated city after three weeks of the terrible earthquake are seen in long queues in front of the camps of some five donor agencies.
“You would hardly observe maximum six relief camps set up in all the villages of Balakot. We are grateful to the international donor agencies for providing the victims with branded and neat items. You can see the items being distributed by local organizations flowing down the Kunhar River,” a government servant from Ganoon village of Balakot who works in Islamabad told Dawn.
The villages of the worst-hit Balakot are disconnected from the main city, as the only connecting bridge is broken and there is no alternative route to approach the far-flung areas.
The relief organizations, therefore, unload their convoys in the city where it is quite easy to count the number of NGOs and other humanitarian firms. The biggest charitable organization, also the most popular among the local people for distributing huge quantity of relief items, is the one from the UAE. Besides, there is a Red Crescent camp, while just three relief camps are run by the local agencies.
Most of the quake victims can be seen converging on the foreign relief camps, as according to them the items being distributed by local NGOs are of substandard quality and not fit for daily use.
“I know the progress and activities of certain so-called relief camps, but there is no need to blame them because the situation here is very sensitive and the victims just rely upon a single grain of wheat. I am sure the local NGOs would not have distributed 500 tents among the people compared to international agencies who are about to deliver almost 80,000 tents apart from unaccountable other items,” a student volunteer in the city said two days after the disaster. In the inaccessible villages, mobile teams of international agencies are handing over chits to the people who then come down to the city for receiving the prescribed goods from the camps.
There are no workers of local NGOs who could just carry the relief packages to the rural areas. “During the four days after the killer quake, there were some NGOs but now none of them exists here,” Majid Rashid, a victim in Kanjkol village, said.
The city still needs assistance from charitable organizations as there are various sectors to be facilitated, but the relief workers are escaping the locality.
Some international relief camps in the city are about to complete their assistance programmes and their officials would leave for their countries in the next two weeks, after which the hapless people would have to depend on the local organizations. The task to provide long-term assistance to the people would be assigned to local organizations, but unfortunately they too have left Balakot hastily.
“We will live in Balakot as long as we get shelter, food and other things; but if the donors stopped their activities we will also leave the area because the city would be deserted without relief,” a group of people standing in a queue for receiving relief said.
The desperate people of the city always look at trucks coming from Islamabad side and rush towards it. But if these conveys are stopped these people would march towards other cities.
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