Pakistan quake victims struggle to rebuild

By Paul Wiseman, USA TODAY

BALAKOT, Pakistan — The roads into the mountains are blocked by mudslides. The tents can't keep out the cold. Many children are too frightened to return to the classroom after seeing their old schools collapse on their friends. Shopkeepers have lost their shops, farmers their livestock, landlords their tenants. Nearly everyone has lost someone they loved.

	Children who survived the October earthquake play in front of their collapsed house in Balakot.
By Sajjad Qayyum, AFP/Getty Images

And the aid money the world promised is trickling, not pouring, into Pakistan.

Nearly five months after the Oct. 8 magnitude-7.6 earthquake devastated huge swaths of northeastern Pakistan and killed more than 73,000 people, normal life is still a distant goal for hundreds of thousands of quake survivors.

They are stranded in the mountains, cut off from the rest of the world by mudslides, or huddled together in temporary tent encampments in quake-shattered towns like this one 40 miles west of Pakistan's disputed border with India.

Maj. Gen. Farooq Ahmed Khan, Pakistan's Federal Relief Commissioner, said in an interview that it will take at least three years to put everyone in permanent housing and fully restore institutions such as schools, hospitals and government offices. "They can't live in tents forever," he said. But it takes time to "build houses in such difficult terrain."

The canvas tents are miserable. They can't quite keep out the cold and the rain. And it's dangerous to light a fire inside to keep warm; clinics across the quake zone report receiving dozens of burn victims, scalded when tent fires blazed out of control. The hospital built by the U.S. 212th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital unit (MASH) in the provincial capital Muzaffarabad — handed over to the Pakistani government last week — has treated more than 25 patients for burns.

Miserable in tents

Mahmood Khan, 26, has come down from the higher elevations to collect a few sheets of corrugated metal being handed out by a relief group in Devalian, a village nestled between snow-tipped mountains in the breathtaking Neelam Valley.

Devalian, a ramshackle village of tents and improvised shacks with walls of salvaged timber and corrugated metal, has emerged as a supply base of sorts: U.S. military helicopters, swerving between sheer rock cliffs, drop off sacks of wheat. Relief groups distribute aid — food, blankets, building materials — and run a medical clinic. Several hundred people live in the village. Most are quake victims who came down from the mountains.

Khan, who lost his wife and a daughter in the quake, lives in a tent about three hours' walk from Devalian. "We cannot burn wood inside the tent, and there's no protection from the rain," he says. He plans to haul the metal sheets up the mountains on his back to build a sturdier, warmer home.

It could have been worse. After a slow start, the Pakistani military, government and international relief agencies finally mobilized, clearing rubble and air-lifting massive amounts of food, blankets and tents to quake victims stranded in the mountains. A desperation vaccination campaign — nearly 1.2 million children were inoculated against measles — stopped a feared "second-wave" of death by disease in the wake of the killer quake.

Unseasonably mild weather has replaced the record-low temperatures of January, easing the suffering of the 350,000 to 380,000 people the United Nations says are living in the hills, and improving conditions for relief flights.

Livelihoods also destroyed

The emergency phase of the aid operation is transitioning to helping quake victims get back to normal life. Obstacles remain:

• International aid is falling short. Late last year, the United Nations put out an urgent request for $550 million in quake aid; so far, it says it has received commitments for only $352 million. The U.N.'s World Food Program has warned that it will have to cut back on helicopter flights to remote areas that carry not only emergency food supplies, but seeds and livestock needed to put farmers back in business. The reason: The WFP has received $57 million of the $100 million it needs, agency spokesman Amjad Jamal says.

By Eric Feferberg, AFP/Getty Images
Pakistani earthquake survivors pray in front of the ruins of the mosque in the northern town of Balakot.

The government of Pakistan says it has taken in barely $1 billion of the $6.5 billion other countries and international aid groups pledged. Salman Shah, Pakistan's adviser to the prime minister on economics and finance, says the numbers aren't as bad as they appear; some of the pledges are for in-kind donations such as helicopter flights and food supplies that won't ever show up in the Pakistan government's coffers. Still, Ahmed Khan says: "We would like the money to come in faster." WFP spokesman Jamal also says "donor fatigue" may have set in after the initial quake emergency and the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia.

• Quake victims have been struggling to make money after the disaster destroyed their workplaces. Businesses so far have received no compensation for their losses. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies says the quake killed about 20,000 of the 35,000 people living in Balakot, once a backpacker outpost nestled in the Kaghan Valley. The town, built on the banks of the turbulent Kunhar River, is surrounded by pine forests and is in the shadow of the Himalayas.

The quake toppled nearly every building. Hafiz Shaeebb-ir Ahmed, 40, lost his bakery. He says he needs 500,000 rupees (about $8,300) to open a new one. Haroon Khan, 56, and his five brothers own a market that once had 250 shops. Now, only 25 are operating. Khan and a delegation of Balakot merchants visited Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf last month, asking for financial assistance to get their businesses running again. Musharraf, Khan says, raised the possibility of getting Pakistani banks to offer businesses in the quake zone 15-year, interest-free loans. "Nothing has been done yet," he says. Desperate for income, many Balakot residents have left to find work as day laborers in big cities such as Rawalpindi and Lahore.

• Government agencies and relief groups lack reliable information about the number of victims and what they need. Rehan Farooqui, 26, a Karachi graduate student who is the volunteer director of an emergency medical clinic in Balakot, says the government often underestimates how much aid is needed in remote villages. "The government has no data," he says. Ahmed Khan, the relief coordinator, concedes that good information is difficult to get. "In these areas where you don't have telephones, the data cannot be good," he says.

Many are traumatized

The quake has left thousands of victims traumatized and unable to cope. Osama Jahangeer, 9, saw his 5-year-old brother die when their elementary school collapsed in the quake; his own leg was broken. A new school is running in Balakot, but Osama refuses to go. "I'm afraid," he says. Jack Norman, head of Catholic Relief Services Pakistan operations, says: "There still are people afraid to be under a roof."

Profiteers have driven up the price of transportation and construction, making the cost of rebuilding homes prohibitive for some families. For instance, Abdullah Jan, 40, wants to rebuild his farmhouse in Shunga village, high in the mountains about 10 miles outside Balakot. The government gave him and other quake victims an initial payment of 25,000 rupees ($415) for rebuilding. But the money's already gone, he says. Some of it was spent on daily living expenses. A lot was used to get back and forth between Shunga and Balakot, where he lives with seven family members in a tent that can barely keep out the winter cold.

He says he's grateful for all the aid the government and relief agencies have provided, but he wants to go home. "Everyone, including the Americans, helped a lot," Jan says. "But we just want to get back and restore our old life."

Contributing: Zafar M. Sheikh

URL: http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-02-26-pakistan-earthquake_x.htm