November 24, 2005

 

While ordinary Pakistanis have poured massive amounts of relief goods and funds into the earthquake-hit areas, often leaving their schools and jobs behind to volunteer in the relief effort themselves, one finds meagre evidence of the state’s presence, writes Fatima Bhutto
 

I arrived in Islamabad on a Friday night. Not being a doctor, engineer, or lawyer, but rather a simple humanities graduate, I was unsure of what I could do for the victims of the devastating October 8 earthquake. The notion of disaster tourism — visiting the site of a catastrophe — always seemed distasteful to me.

I had watched many politicians on TV standing over the bed of a crippled child, head tilted, lips pursed, nodding in overly performative sympathy and asking inane questions like, “....and beta, were you scared?” or “what did you like studying in school (that is, when you had one?)” and was loathed to take part in the disaster tourism charade.

However, when the chance arose for me to travel to the affected areas and donate relief goods to young children and women, I immediately leapt at the chance. I wanted to help in some way but promised myself that I would not belittle the suffering of those victims by acting like a peeping tom with a predilection for calamity.

I hadn’t been to Islamabad in several years and upon driving through the city I was surprised at how normal it all seemed. Islamabad was as antiseptic as it had always been. I bit my tongue and stopped the disaster tourist inside me from asking where on earth all the rubble was and from seeking directions to the now infamous Margalla Towers.

Over the next few days, as we drove closer to Balakot, through affected areas like Mansehra, the normalcy disappeared. There was the cruel and ironic, the banal, and the uplifting, all in one place.

Pakistan is at the best of times filled with contradictions, which are magnified tenfold by occurrences of the extraordinary. Outside Balakot a sign advertising a picnic area read ‘Heaven’s Spot’. There were no picnickers present, of course, as ‘Heaven’s Spot’ is now littered with the remains of human life. The wreckage of the earthquake was not being removed by bulldozers or cranes, it was being captured by the ubiquitous camera phone, which I witnessed many bystanders using to survey the damage around them.

Perhaps, denied the opportunity or the chance to help, our next human instinct is to record. Perhaps those pictures would educate the world to the plight of the earthquake victims and play a part in shedding light on the tragedy of the earthquake.

In fact, while ordinary Pakistanis have poured massive amounts of relief goods and funds into the area, often bravely leaving their schools and jobs behind to volunteer in the relief effort themselves, one finds meagre evidence of the state’s presence in the affected areas.

There were, however, large ostentatious camps set up by various political parties, which one might have welcomed save for the large and often goofy posters of their respective political leaders — reeking of political mileage —- receiving all the injured that sought their aid. I was little comforted by the large billboard near Balakot with our embattled president’s image on it, arms outstretched and brows furrowed exclaiming “Let’s build a semi-permanent village!” The banality of the statement was disconcerting. Why not a permanent village? Why not total reconstruction, and not the semi-permanent kind?

While there are so many questions to be asked, and while this may not be the time to point accusations, when will we get some answers?

There are a lot of questions such as why a country on a rather prominent fault line hadn’t built the necessary civil organizations to cope with an earthquake? Or why, with all the investment we have spent on military and nuclear gadgets, Pakistan is almost totally dependent on foreign expertise, foreign aid, and foreigners to save the wounded? And then there are the thousand and one smaller questions which have been asked and still remain unanswered.

Before leaving the town, once all the goods we had brought were distributed and received, our car had stopped by a roadside and as I was leaning out of the window a young girl, no older than seven or eight, smiled and waved at me. I waved back and she came over to the car and spoke to me and my family.

Her name was Ulfat, and luckily she and all the members of her family had survived the quake but were rendered homeless. We spoke for a while and when it was time to go, having nothing else on us at the end of a long journey except some candy, we passed Ulfat the bag of sugary sweets wishing we had something more useful, something more permanent to give her.

The moment our hands parted a swarm of young boys descended upon her and tried hungrily to take her sweets when an old man, himself injured and living in the camps, moved towards the children and told them “Don’t steal, don’t steal...”

Though I was hesitant about embarking on what I had perceived as ‘disaster tourism’, I left Islamabad not entirely sure of how meaningful my small contribution might have been for those robbed of their shelters and their loved ones. I was, however, completely emboldened by the courage and awe-inspiring spirit of those that I had met. The resilience of the Pakistani people is surely unparalleled and that is something that no one can detract from.

In Balakot there are fruit stands operating under the remains of all but collapsed buildings, a small mark of human defiance against all the odds. There are freshly filled coffins, not measuring more than three feet long, being tended and watched by the old who want nothing more than to bury their children with the grace that they deserve, because truer than the inevitability of death is the fact that for the living, life must go on. And in Balakot it does, and with the utmost human dignity imaginable.

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