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REMEMBER the day when we first heard about the earthquake? It was a Saturday morning, and some reports came in saying that Islamabad had been badly shaken. I recall a TV channel playing footage of their studio shaking and the anchor started reciting a dua, while one guest just sat there, and another got up to run out then turned to look at the others who were staying put and decided to sit down again. Wonder whose instincts were serving them the best.
It is also worth recalling the heroic stories of survival that came out of the earthquake. We got a small group of volunteers and travelled to a village in Bagh to set up a small distribution point. The villagers showed me around and took me to the remains of the school.
“The day of the earthquake, we all ran to the school,” they told me. The children were all buried inside the rubble. “There were muffled screams coming from below this rubble.” They started to slowly remove the rubble, one piece at a time, taking care to not cause a big cave-in, and began rescuing the kids one at a time. It took a long time. By that evening the hailstorm started and a number of children were still trapped inside. Everybody had to run for cover.
“We came back the next day, and the voices from under the rubble were more muffled, more subdued,” they told me. The rescue continued and a few more children were pulled out. The next day when they returned, the voices were largely gone.
Those same villagers took me to a small rickety shelter, standing on four makeshift pillars tied to trees. “The night the hailstorm came, we all gathered under this roof. It was the only shelter that night. For a while we were silent, praying and hoping the shelter doesn’t fall, and then the aftershocks came.”
They spent the whole night under that shelter, with hail lashing the darkness around them and the ground trembling beneath. Occasional rock-falls punctuated the night.
“Then somebody started praying out loud, and we all joined in. And all night we sat huddled under this roof, praying loudly together and waiting for it to pass.”
Remember the feeling of helplessness and despair? What a Herculean effort of the will it was simply to get through the day for the survivors.
Stories of this sort were found all over the affected areas. On our way up, we passed by two trucks filled to the brim with prosthetic limbs. The smell of death hung in the air throughout the valley. Large populations living in remote regions had not been reached yet, but one friend encountered an elderly couple who would make a long journey across a mountaintop to come to the city to pick up supplies and carry back whatever they could.
The younger, more able-bodied members of the household were casualties, but a few of the youngest ones had survived and couldn’t make the journey to the city. So the elderly couple was making regular treks to the city to pick up whatever supplies they could carry back for the children on a regular basis. The journey took the better part of the day, so they would trek one day, pick up the supplies, sleep somewhere on the street, and make the journey back the next day.
Another friend saw a man crying and pleading with doctors at a hospital. When he approached to find out what the matter was, he heard the man pleading with the doctors to please not amputate his son’s limb. “You amputated my other son’s leg the other day, please spare this one, what will I do with two sons who have no legs!” The doctors told him there was no alternative, the gangrene had spread too far, and took the boy away into the operating theatre.
We heard stories of Cuban doctors who put in 16 hour long days performing surgery almost non-stop. There was the story of a doctor in a remote part of KP province, somewhere outside Besham I think but I forget the exact location, who was shot dead by some people because he would not leave the people he was treating at the time and go with them to their house immediately.
There was another story told by a survivor brought by an NGO to LUMS, where I used to teach at the time, who told us of his village’s experience. “All houses have been destroyed,” he told us. “We gathered all the survivors in the mosque located on a mountain slope, which had somehow survived. The old, the infirm, women, children, all were gathered in that mosque.”
Then they went out to search for more survivors and a large aftershock hit. “We turned around to see the entire mosque slide down the mountainside and fall into the river below. The screams of everybody inside could be heard. There were a couple of hundred people huddled in there.”
Remember those days? Remember the feeling of helplessness, and the near despair of it all? What a Herculean effort of the will it was simply to get through the day for the survivors. What enormous feats of bravery and heroism were shown by ordinary people, like the man we saw on TV who carried his daughter on his back for more than 20kms to get her to a hospital. A vast swathe of the country was submerged in this desperate search for survival, coping with unimaginable loss, looking out for landslides and aftershocks. And then came the winter.
We made it through. That’s the biggest story from it all. Of course there was no choice, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t an extraordinary feat of human strength to make it happen. We made it through and proved to ourselves that no matter how grave the challenge, persevere and keep the faith. Even the darkest of clouds eventually part. Even the darkest of nights eventually yields to day.
The writer is a member of staff.
Twitter: @khurramhusain
Published in Dawn, October 8th , 2015
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