Subject: to beena, barry from az re: Musings from the earthquake zone
From: "sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy" <sharmeenobaid@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: sharmeen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Musings from the earthquake zone
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2006 09:14:11 -0500
Dear Friends,
I recently returned from Balakot, Mansehra, Muzzafarabad and Bagh
and wanted to send you my observations from the area...I didn’t
write a diary this time around...Just some general notes about
life in the winter and the conditions there...
All the best
Sharmeen
===============================================================
Dispatch 1: From my travels between January 12th-17th 2006
Balakot/Mansehra:
It's been raining here for several days now...Rain, hail,
lightening and thunder and the only thing separating nature from
me is a big white tent laden with plastic sheets (to prevent water
from seeping through).
Imagine surviving the October 8 earthquake and then having to live
through these treacherous conditions every day in a roadside tent.
This is real life trauma that the earthquake refugees have to face
on a daily basis.
Nasreen Bibi, lost her young husband and her two children in the
Oct 8th tragedy. She lost her home, her belongings and her job.
Her new home is in a small tent community in Ghari Habibullah.
"What will become of me," she questions? Her three young children
scream out in pain when the sky thunders, when the rain comes
pouring through their tent. "The rain and hail reminds them of the
earthquake," she tells me. "It reminds them of their home, their
dead father and sisters. We just want to get away from all of
this, but where can we go?"
That is a question I grappled with throughout my visit to the
region...Will the scars of the earthquake ever heal? Do these
people have the strength to survive the next two months in these
conditions? Nasreen has no money, she has no one to turn to, how
will women like her feed their children when the aid dies down,
when the world community moves to another natural tragedy
somewhere else in the world...what hope does Nasreen have for the
future?
As you drive from Islamabad to Balakot, every four wheel jeep and
every truck on the road bears the banner of an international NGO.
From the Japanese to the Swiss every NGO is in the region. In
fact, I have never seen so many charities working in Pakistan. I
met volunteers from the U.S. from France, Germany, Turkey,
Malaysia, the U.K. and Indonesia...They have all come to the area
to help out...They hand out food, kerosene, water...The world
community is responding to the immediate needs of these people
with impressive speed, but then what? A volunteer from Médecins
Sans Frontières (MSF) wondered out loud to me at a kerosene
distribution point, "This is a huge disaster, we are doing all we
can, but we don’t see any rebuilding going on, and we wonder when
that will start."
The same question lingers on the minds of the residents of Balakot
as I found out when I spoke to them in the makeshift vegetable
market.
Zaheer Khan's village is an hour's hike from Balakot. He was
buying vegetables for his wife, when I walked up to him. After
some pleasant banter he got right to the point. "We don’t have any
building supplies, no wood, not enough tin sheets or tools to
rebuild our house." As he spoke, a seventy year old man named
Karimullah stopped by to say, "Nobody rebuilds for the poor, we
will never have our homes back, we will live like refugees for
years to come."
The desperate conditions in the refugee camps have angered many
people in the area; Some of who feel trapped in their new tent
communities. As I left the market, a young man named Sami Zahoor
pulled me aside. He had come from Peshawar to help build tin
houses in Balakot. "There is one institution that is working
hard," he told me. "The Pakistan army, without them this area
would be in complete chaos. They have kept everyone in check, they
have bought law and order to the region. They clear away the roads
when the mud slides happen, and when Pakistani citizens like
myself offer our help to rebuild, they assist us. There is already
some rebuilding taking place, but you cant suddenly find housing
for 3 million people, it will take time..."
This was not the first time I heard this, throughout my trip, I
heard young men crediting the army for the work they have done in
the region...
But there was also another group that got very high marks from the
residents of Balakot...The Islamic relief group, Jamaat ud-Dawa.
The Jamaat has strong links to the banned Kashmiri jihadi
organization Lashkar-e-Tayyiba. I made my way to Mansehra to visit
a camp run by them.
From the outside the camp looks like any other refugee unit,
except for the shining advertisement boards outside the entrance
which reads "Complete Islamic Veiling for Women," Camp run along
Islamic lines, separate schools for girls and boys."
Once you walk in you realize that these people mean business. They
have a state of the art operation theater, medical facilities,
they have set up computers in tent classes, they have massive
electricity generators, a play area for children, a four storey
storage facility filled to the brim with warm clothes, bedding and
food stock. If nothing else, these people are extremely well
funded and have dedicated volunteers who have spent months on end
working in the camp.
The atmosphere in this camp is very different. Men with long hair
and long beards walk around, making sure that men and women are
not seated together and that women are properly veiled. They
prohibit photography and anything "un-Islamic" such as
television. “Photographs are not allowed in Islam,?they tell me.
Abu Zargam who runs one of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa camps was very
forthright when I met him at the camp. He told me that the Jamaat
had nothing to do with the armed Lashkar-e-Tayibba (militant
outfit) yet he couldn’t explain to me why so many of the young men
in the camp, hid their faces every time a camera was pointed at
them and why one of them told my colleague that Jihad was an
important pillar of Islam. (Totally false for those people
unfamiliar with Islam) Abu Zargam spoke about the need to create a
society run on the lines of Islam..."Our refugee camp is a
microcosm of what Pakistani society should be like," he said.
"Segregation, no entertainment like cinema, no billboards of half
naked women. And this is how its going to be once the relief
operation is over. We are teaching these people to pray, to seek
forgiveness from God, to run their lives according to Islam."
It is no doubt that they are providing excellent services to the
refugees, further down the road at another camp, children don’t
even have access to a school, here they are learning Microsoft on
Pentium 5 computers. Something to wonder about...
Kasim Sohail who came to the camp from Kaghan told me that he
liked the environment. "Look we like segregation, so we are happy
with the services here. They are teaching us about Islam, it is an
opportunity for my young son to learn about the religion. I don’t
want him to make the same mistakes I did, or my generation did..."
The question here is what kind of an Islam are these people being
taught? Is Islam only about complete segregation? Is it not also
about forgiveness, about love and compassion?
What kind of an Islam will Karim's son grow up with?
Just outside the Jamaat camp, a young woman approaches my car and
begs me to listen to her. "These people are not interested in
relief work. I am a widow with two young daughters. These people
only help those who agree with their Islam. I don’t veil
completely and neither do my daughters so they refused to help us.
In fact one of the men in the camp told me to cover up or never
show my face here again. My head is covered, I’m wearing the
traditional clothes, what more do they want?"
These are the politics of their relief work...Everything in life
comes at a cost, and the cost of allowing these kinds of groups to
actively operate in the area will come to surface slowly....Their
impact will be ever lasting...
As the rain continues to pelt down, cases of pneumonia are on the
rise. In every camp I visited, I saw young children succumbing to
the respiratory disease. Most people in the Balakot/Mansehra area
are drinking contaminated water from the river, so kidney problems
are on the rise. There is no sanitation, no waste disposal and
everyone is exposed to these conditions on a daily basis. Children
are playing in such conditions, women are cooking and washing
clothes in these conditions and it’s taking a toll on their lives.
As you drive down from Balakot to Islamabad, it really hits you
Balakot
looks like a war-torn, refugee zone, where life has come to a
complete halt after the earthquake
Where people are still clinging to worn out
photographs of loved ones lost in the rubble?>
Islamabad is buzzing
school children piled up in vans head to school, cars
whiz by, shops are crammed with buyers and one hopes that as the
months go by Balakot, once the tourist destination of choice
stands up tall, embraces the winter and fights back to rebuild?>
Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy
www.sharmeenobaidfilms.com
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