After the quake

Pakistan
T
he city looks like it has been leveled with a nuclear bomb. Only comparisons to Hiroshima or perhaps Nuremburg can convey how completely this city of 25,000 was annihilated just six weeks ago. But the impact on Balakot, Pakistan, came from the earth itself, a 7.6 magnitude quake that reduced the entire city to rubble in sixty seconds. I arrived at the city from the main road that winds up one side of the mountain valley, crossing the river that cuts through the valley over a bridge at the city’s center before switch-backing up the opposite side of the valley. From there I could see the remains of the entire city, up into the suburbs on the distant ridges. The scene of the destruction was impossibly vast, with demolished buildings stretching from one end of the horizon to the other; it was impossible to fit into the camera’s frame. I have seen the capital of Sierra Leone after it was ransacked and burned to the ground, the West Bank city of Jenin after it was leveled by Israeli missiles and bulldozers, the shores of Sri Lanka after the tsunami. I have never seen anything like Balakot. We had arrived there on our third day in North West Paksistan after we had already heard countless horror stories and seen thousands of demolished and damaged homes spread out across the mountainsides. But when I saw Balakot, the tears came without warning.
From the roadside vantage point up the far side of the valley I could hear the scrape and crunch of the few bulldozers at work clearing the remains, absurdly dwarfed by the enormity of the ruins around them. Down the hillside to the edge of the river, and across the other side and up the opposite side of the valley, I saw hundreds if not thousands of tents dotted here and there in the spaces between the collapsed buildings. Some of them are higher quality than others, and many bear the name of the donating country; China, UAE, ‘Gift of the American People.’ A cold wind blasted down the valley, shaking the flaps of the thousands of tents that had sprung up here and there around the demolished buildings. On the road behind me a half dozen men prayed outside on top of the ruins of their demolished mosque, while in front of me an older man and woman sifted through a pile of donated clothes dumped by the roadside, looking for something worth keeping. The flimsy tarpaulin behind them looked hopeless against the cold.
Kashmir made an easier story for western journalists already struggling to keep the Pakistan earthquake in the public imagination, because it could be tied to a recurrent news story about Indian and Pakistani fighting over the disputed territory. Because some of the militant groups in Kashmir are Islamist, some journalists could even tied the earthquake story, indirectly, to Al Quaeda, and from there to the Global War on Terrorism. The worst stories wrapped the story in an ironic, bittersweet package that western journalists seem to love best; ‘amongst the wreckage, hope for peace in Kashmir.’ But the quake’s fault line ran from Indian-held Kashmir, through the Pakistani side, and onward to North West Frontier Province, where Balakot and thousands of smaller towns and villages suffered just as much damage, yet received none of the headlines. Many in the west have now heard of the Pakistani town of Muzaffarabad, yet despite what happened there, almost none have heard of Balakot.
It has been estimated that 70 percent of the town’s population died, though to stare down at the wreckage I couldn’t believe that even 30 percent had survived. Of the hundreds of structures once standing, only a few dozen remain. Nearly all of those that collapsed have collapsed completely, two and three story buildings that now stand like stacks of concrete pancakes five feet off the ground flanked by twisted fingers of iron poking at the sky.
In addition to the thousands of blue and white tents that punctuate the hillsides adjacent to destroyed homes, hundreds of larger, more organized tent camps – or tent cities, as the Pakistani military is calling them – line the sides of the road that snake up through the valley. On subsequent days we drove up the road for 6 hours, about a third of the way to China on a route still used by smugglers. It was hard to reconcile the utter hopelessness of the humanitarian situation with the breathtaking beauty of the scenery; through valleys and over ridges the road wound past golden brown, geometrically terraced hillsides, tall pine forests, and rushing turquoise rivers against the backdrop of the distant snow-capped Himalayas.
With 25,000 inhabitants Balakot was the largest city in North West Frontier Province directly on the fault line, yet due to the number of villages affected, the scale of the devastation is impossible to comprehend; over 73,000 persons killed, and three and a half million persons were rendered homeless, in a mere 60 seconds. Hundreds of villages are scattered across the mountains, and not one we saw had escaped without damage; many had been completely flattened. Hour after hour on the road revealed hillsides peppered with hundreds of villages and small hamlets perched halfway up the hillsides and nestled in the valleys, each with dozens of blue or white tents scattered around the buildings. With line of sight access to the main road, these villages were among the luckier ones, more accessible to the Pakistani army and the international aid organizations. The outlying villages, many of them accessible only by helicopter, have not been so lucky. Though snow was not far away and the earthquake had struck over seven weeks ago, many were still receiving tents for the first time. The army simply didn’t have enough helicopters to reach them all.
I had come to Pakistan on behalf of the non-government organization I work for to monitor the local NGO we were funding. On my delegation were a local politician, as well as a member of Parliament and his videographer, both of whom were there to raise more funds for the earthquake survivors. I was happy to find that the organization we had been funding was, indeed, highly professional, and though there were a few emerging problems to address in their camp, the conditions there were among the best I saw; the tents were properly spaced; the number of latrines – 1 per 20 persons – conformed to international standards; channels had been dug to quickly drain rain water, and the trash was being disposed of properly.
Other camps I saw were not so well maintained. Hundreds of smaller and inexperienced organizations flooded the region when the earthquake struck, many of them armed only with a bit of funding and good intentions. Some of the Islamic and jihadist parties have also pitched in to establish camps, and while some of them have been offering the region services like health care for years, most of them have no experience managing large camps for displaced persons. The difference between the good and the bad organizations will be measured in dead children.
I saw one camp where three hundred tightly packed tents shared three latrines, far below the number required by international standards; I doubt that this camp was unexceptional. Such camps will breed disease, and the first to suffer what aid professionals refer to as ‘morbidity and mortality,’ or sickness and death, will be children under five. Unicef has reported that measles outbreaks have already claimed the lives of some children south of Muzaffarabad, a disease that can also cause blindness if left untreated. In the unsanitary, tightly packed conditions of the more poorly run camps, public health-related diseases will spread more quickly. This earthquake has already been dubbed ‘the one that killed the children’ because a disproportionate number of the dead were killed in schools while many of their parents were outside working the land. It is a tragic reality that as the winter comes, the snow begins to fall, and both aid agency funding and conditions in the camps will undoubtedly deteriorate, the children will again be among the first to pay.
It is difficult to determine if the survivors in the camps – the vast majority of whom have lost everything – are worse off than those that remain in their villages. Road access to many of the hundreds of villages scattered across these provinces was difficult in the best of circumstances; now it is impossible. Landslides have covered many of the major roads, and the backcountry roads may not be cleared by bulldozers for years. Aftershocks and landslides occur with such regularity that they have ceased making headlines. A 5.5 quake struck while I was attending an outdoor meeting in a camp at the bottom of one hillside, and the ground beneath our feet vibrated like a trampoline. Everyone fell silent and looked nervously looked to each other for reassurance, and a few moments later the meeting resumed without comment. But many people are still afraid, especially the children.
Snow will further complicating access to villages, many of whom are not accessible all winter. I attended a food distribution for one village that was completely inaccessible by road; the residents had to carry their 40 kg bags of wheat and two 10 liter cans of oil two and a half kilometers from the distribution point. On the sunny, cloudless day that the distribution took place – the first food assistance these people had received in the six weeks since the quake hit – they reported that last year at the time the first snow had already fallen. By the height of winter, it was seven feet deep. I asked the aid agency doing the distribution how they planned to continue reaching this village through the winter, and they didn’t yet know. Some of the villagers were old, crippled, blind or widows, and needed help to carry their supply to their tents; I shuddered to think how – or if – they will survive the winter.
All of the villages are still heavily reliant on air assistance overseen by the Pakistani military, with the assistance of some UN and NATO helicopters. The logistical challenges imposed by an airlift to hundreds of villages through the five to six months of winter have led them to encourage the residents of the higher villages to come down to the camps, but many are reluctant to do so. Many have livestock that they cannot take with them, and many others are emotionally tied to their land and their homes, and for whatever reason, they do not want to leave.
On the day of the food distribution, two days after we’d seen Balakot, the local politician on our delegation had a breakdown. Of Pakistani background, he spoke fluent Urdu, and he was helping some of the disabled residents navigate the distribution process. When he said that the suffering of these people was getting to be just too much for him, I told him to take a walk by himself and try to shake it off. A half hour later I saw him wandering around in a nearby field, crying wildly. I saw a farmer approach and lead him by the hand into his compound, and I followed them in.
When I arrived he was still crying uncontrollably. He turned to me and through lines of spittle hanging from his lips, confessed that he didn’t want to go, that he wanted to stay and help. The family – a married couple, an old man and woman, and several children – looked on bewildered. I told him that these people were much stronger than he realized. I told him that he was right to want to help, and he shouldn’t forget how this experience made him feel. He said later that the only thing that stopped him from staying was the knowledge that there was not much that he could do to help them. The family made us cups of sweet tea before showing us the missing walls, the fractures splitting the mud ceilings, the piles of rubble. I dutifully took pictures. The politician eventually pulled it together, giving his winter coat to the grandmother before he left.
But I wondered what will happen to them, or to the three million other displaced persons that warrant barely a mention in the latter pages of the international sections of the larger newspapers, a scant 2 months since the quake hit. International donors’ memories are only slightly longer than those of the media and the general public, and when the next large catastrophe hits, Pakistan will likely be forgotten altogether. Though the story may never be written, tens of thousands more will likely die.
On the roadside hilltop in Balakot I met a man and his daughter, living in a tent on the roof of their demolished house, now just a few feet off the ground. They showed me the three holes that the father and their neighbors had pounded in the concrete roof to rescue the daughter from inside. The girl had been home with her mother when the earthquake hit, and both had survived, trapped by the rubble. They spoke to each other during the nine hours that they waited to be rescued. Just a few minutes before the girl was pulled out, her mother uttered a prayer and died. Show him, the father said, climb in the hole and show him how we pulled you out. I begged him not to make her go down there, and he relented.