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December 22, 2005
....and life goes on
Walking along the main road in Balakot — still one of the most beautiful cities in Pakistan — nearly 175 km north of Islamabad, life is slowly getting back on its feet. The earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale that hit the northern parts of Pakistan on October 8, had completely razed this sleepy town enclosed on all sides by mountains with river Jhelum meandering lazily in the middle.There are signs that tell you so. A barber has set up his shop — two chairs and a table in the open — on what was once his shop, and is busy. “Today is my first day,” he says, somberly. “Life has to go on, how much longer can we just grieve?” he asks.
“Very little has changed as far as destruction is concerned,” says David Pratt, foreign editor with Sunday Herald, Glasgow. He was in Balakot on October 11, third day after the quake struck. “It’s incredible, this scale of destruction,” he says as if seeing it for the first time again. “It gets bigger and bigger, but this time you see tents, and more tents all over. People seem to be coming to terms, but I wonder if they realize the enormity of the task ahead?”
A butcher in a nearby shop is busy selling meat, next to him in the rubble, a vendor is making fresh kebabs. A news agent has made a four-wheel cart his shop from where he sells newspapers. “This,” he says, pointing to a place behind him, “was my shop.” And near the rubble, you notice an old man, sitting in a chair, comfortably reading a newspaper, oblivious to his surroundings. It seems surreal, the way people are carrying on when signs of devastation, of human loss, are all over.
A little further, again amid the rubble and the debris of the Government Primary School, Garlat, for boys and girls — where strewn bags, caps and small-sized shoes are a cruel and disturbing reminder of how life can change in mere seconds — octogenarian Aziz-ur-Rehman, along with three young boys, is looking for textbooks and forming neat piles.
“Before these schools are completely bulldozed, we’re digging out books which can later be reused,” he explains. He says he gets Rs300 by the International Labour Organization (ILO) every day for this sorting job. “There were a total of 400 boys and girls, studying in the two separate premises side-by side, of which about 250 died that day,” says Mohammad Arif, a teacher for the past seven years, who survived the quake.
“We will rebuild Balakot,” says Muzaffar Hussain with a conviction, and others in the milling crowd nod, too. What strikes you is their amazing resilience. Rizwan Khan, 15, studying in Class VIII was buried alive when his school — Government High School Balakot — caved in. There were 750 boys studying in that school that day but only 350 could be pulled out.
“We were buried for over four hours. We screamed for help but when no one came, we began to dig and clambered out,” he says.“The school is ready but regular classes have not started due to the erratic attendance of teachers. So we have plenty of time to play,” says Bilal Hussain, Khan’s friend. “That’s because the teachers have either been injured, or there have been injuries or deaths in their families,” explains a bystander.
“Of the 32 teachers of that school, half got injured. There is not a single family in all of Balakot which has not been affected,” he explains. This is corroborated by Shahzaman, personal assistant to the principal of the school, employed there for the last 27 years. “The children are very upset and so are the teachers. There are many injured, some serious, among their families, so it is natural that studies have taken a backseat these days.”
Their new school premises, though quite out of place in this pastoral surrounding, is a brand new cluster of five quake-proof galvanized-sheets of 15ft x 30ft classrooms, the principal’s office and a washroom. But the two mass graves are a constant reminder of the havoc the temblor inflicted on the students when it buried alive 85 of Khan’s schoolmates and their three teachers. The school is among the 16,000 schools and colleges destroyed on October 8. The same pre-fab work on the girl’s high school had also started.
“The school is donated by a minister,” informs Rehan Younas. A Lahore-based company is putting up these classes made of iron sheets. He and his colleagues have been working hard to put up classrooms before the snow starts. “It has no joints, so no welding is needed, everything is screwed. The material is weather-resistant and is a permanent solution,” he adds.
“There have been repeated announcements in mosques to send children to schools. But the attendance is very poor because children are scared of going,” says Mohammad Maruf, a head teacher in a nearby town who is a resident of Balakot.
There is an urgent need to motivate the children to get back to their studies, he says and the NGOs can play their part. Recently, Church World Service, an NGO, conducted a disaster preparedness training in the same school.
In another part of Balakot, in a tent city in Bessian, home to some 3,000 quake survivors, Colonel Atif Shafiq who is officer-in-charge says, “A Karachi-based school has pledged to send two teachers and start a school in this compound and later when the survivors are settled in their homes, they plan to set up a permanent arrangement here.”In Muzaffarabad’s Abbas Institute of Medical Sciences (Aims) there are signs of the havoc wrought by the quake with survivors not just in wards but outside in corridors, and still more being brought in all the time. But there is a saying that there is always a silver lining in the dark clouds. And so it was for Lubna Yunas.
It was pure coincidence and a good fortune for Lubna that while she was being checked up by a doctor there, Charlie Bird, a highly energetic chief news correspondent with Radio Telfis Eireann’s (Irish television) for 30 years, and his cameraman, happened to walk into her ward. This was his second visit after the quake. He was completely taken in by Lubna, an amputee and he did a two-minute live coverage of her.
“She grabbed my attention immediately and I thought she made for a good story. She was smiling despite having lost her two legs and an 11-year old son to the quake. Who does that? Would you?” Bird asked simply.
“The moment the film was aired the station started getting phone calls. The response was astounding. My station manager called me from Ireland to tell me that there have been scores of people who say they will pay for her treatment. I know for sure that five of them are committed.”
Later that evening, we go back to the hospital where he tells me to break the good news to the woman.
Lubna, mother of eight — now seven — is a frail young 35-year old woman belonging to a village in Guahatar. During the quake, she remained half buried under a beam for two hours till her husband rescued her. She was brought to Muzaffarabad after four days but by then the wounds on both her legs had become gangrenous and had to be amputated, knees down. “If she can still smile in so much pain and adversity, then I want to see her smile some more when she is able to walk on her own,” says Bird.
The quake-affected area is full of people who will forever be remembered as well as revered for their non-stop service to humanity. Among them is Dr Mukhtar Ahmed, the only neuro-surgeon in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. You meet him at the Aims since his recently set-up neuro-surgery ward in the Combined Military Hospital (CMH) collapsed. Twelve of his close family members had died, including his sister, and even his 18-year-old daughter had received multiple fractures on her face.
“But I had no time to mourn the deaths of my family members or even to check up on my daughter, as there was a deluge of seriously injured people in the place that day,” he recalls.
He is grateful to Karachi-based eminent neuro-surgeon, Dr Rasheed Juma, who after seeing the enormous number of head and spinal injuries in the quake-affected areas, committed to send two neuro-surgeons every 15 days for the next three months.
“It’s such a relief,” sighs Dr Ahmed, who can now visit his daughter and see that she recovers from her physical and mental trauma. “It’s heartening to see these young doctors who sleep on the floor in the doctor’s room, eat whatever is offered and are working non-stop.”Dr Ahmed says there is a dire need for a neuro-surgical centre, the kind he’d established at CMH. “I don’t want people to give me money but rather take over the responsibility and set it up for us. I can’t devote my time for this purpose as I’m so busy with operations. A 20-bed centre is more than enough since we have nothing.”
He says quake victims don’t want to leave their homes and be taken to Islamabad or Lahore for treatment. “We need to fix things here,” stressing on the rebuilding of medical facilities in the area.
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