DACHI (India): Porter Abdur Rashid worked hard for years to build a modest mud and stone house for his family of 10 in occupied Kashmir. Now, he is faced with what seems like an impossible task — building it all over again.

Rashid’s house, located on a hillside in Dachi village, collapsed over the weekend after an earthquake of magnitude 7.6 hit the region and killed more than 20,000 people, mostly in Pakistan.

“I am a poor man but the earthquake has also left me homeless. I don’t know what to do,” said Rashid, whose house has sunk into the ground with only its roof visible.

The porter, now living in a plastic sheet tent with his family, is not alone in his misery.

Every house in Dachi, a scenic village in the Himalayan mountains near the Jhelum river, some 105 km north of Srinagar, has been destroyed or badly damaged.

The quake killed over 900 people in occupied Kashmir and left thousands homeless. In Dachi, a village of more than 2,500, six people, including two children, were killed and more than 50 injured.

“We are the village of the homeless. There is no house that is left standing or safe for villagers to shelter in,” said Mohammad Latif, who teaches at a Dachi school, pointing at his two-storey concrete house which has partially collapsed.

Latif, who used all his life’s savings to build his house, now shelters with his family under cracked tin sheets held up by wooden planks. “We are all equal, the poor and the better-off, in terms of being homeless,” he said.

Across Dachi, all that remains of houses are bare walls or heaps of debris at various levels on the mountainside.

Refrigerators, wash basins and cupboards were strewn alongside dead cows amid the rubble of houses. Some of the injured remain in the village, too poor to pay for a bus ride to the hospital in Uri town.

Dachi residents, like villagers in many remote hamlets in the region, complained that they did not receive help from the authorities for nearly two days after the tremors struck. —Reuters