A massive earthquake left several thousand people dead and injured hundreds of thousands others across Pakistan on Saturday. Azad Jammu and Kashmir, the northern districts of the NWFP, including Mansehra, Abbottabad, Batagram and Shanglapar, received the severest jolts causing colossal human losses. These included 350 schoolchildren, 250 among them girls, killed alone in Mansehra district. More than 20,000 people died with more than 41000 injured.
As most of our Badakhshani Ismaili live in northen part of Pakistan particularly in Hunza and Gilgit, therefore if anybody knows about their condition over there, Please be informed on this website. May mowla keep them in HIs custody
NIzar
Earthquake in Pakistan
Dear Mr. Nizar,<BR><BR>Thank you for your concerns and sympathies. By the grace of Almighty Allah and blessings of Mowlana Hazir Imam, no loss of life or property has so far been reported in Hunza valley or in the surrounding villages . Although the area was jolted o­n October 8 at about 8.54 a.m. and aftershocks are still continued, but it was not so severe in the whole area. The area is surrounded by heavy mountains and we saw boulders and mud coming down, but it didn't hit the area. Even the Karakoram Highway (KKH) was not blocked by bounders and mud and it was clear up to upper Hunza (Gojal). Thank you o­nce again for your prayers. Murtaza, Hussainabad, Hunza.
AGA KHAN EXPRESSES SYMPATHY; ANNOUNCES SUPPORT FOR RELIEF ASSISTANCE
Islamabad, Pakistan, October 10, 2005 – His Highness the Aga Khan, Imam (spiritual leader) of the Ismaili Muslims and founder of the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN), in a letter to His Excellency President General Pervez Musharraf has assured the Government of support for relief assistance for the earthquake victims affected in areas all over Pakistan.
Through FOCUS Humanitarian Assistance, the international emergency relief agency established by the Ismaili Community as well other agencies including the Aga Khan Health Services and the Aga Khan University Hospital, medical services, food, tents, other relief goods and humanitarian assistance, including personnel for search and rescue operations in the affected areas have already been mobilized. Moreover, the helicopters of the AKDN are also being put at the disposal of these humanitarian efforts, facilitated by the Pakistan Army.
His Highness also announced that the AKDN is making an initial contribution of Rs. 30 million (US $500,000) in support of the relief assistance being provided by the Government which will be matched by Habib Bank Limited with a further Rs. 30 million (US $500,000) donation towards the President’s Emergency Relief Fund. In the drive to supplement the relief efforts, the Habib Bank Limited will also provide support to its staff that has been affected by this disaster.
Editor’s Note: The Aga Khan Development Network’s (AKDN) activities in Pakistan encompass cultural, economic and social development and include microfinance, agricultural programmes, health, and education, the introduction of clean-water supplies and sanitation facilities, construction of mini hydro-electric plants, the improvement of public open spaces, community-driven village rehabilitation and house renovation. The Network is a group of private, non-denominational development agencies and institutions that seek to empower communities and individuals, often in disadvantaged circumstances, to improve living conditions and opportunities in specific regions of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Active in over 30 countries, the Network's underlying ethic is compassion for the vulnerable in society. Its agencies and institutions work for the common good of all citizens, regardless of origin, gender or religion.
Islamabad, Pakistan, October 10, 2005 – His Highness the Aga Khan, Imam (spiritual leader) of the Ismaili Muslims and founder of the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN), in a letter to His Excellency President General Pervez Musharraf has assured the Government of support for relief assistance for the earthquake victims affected in areas all over Pakistan.
Through FOCUS Humanitarian Assistance, the international emergency relief agency established by the Ismaili Community as well other agencies including the Aga Khan Health Services and the Aga Khan University Hospital, medical services, food, tents, other relief goods and humanitarian assistance, including personnel for search and rescue operations in the affected areas have already been mobilized. Moreover, the helicopters of the AKDN are also being put at the disposal of these humanitarian efforts, facilitated by the Pakistan Army.
His Highness also announced that the AKDN is making an initial contribution of Rs. 30 million (US $500,000) in support of the relief assistance being provided by the Government which will be matched by Habib Bank Limited with a further Rs. 30 million (US $500,000) donation towards the President’s Emergency Relief Fund. In the drive to supplement the relief efforts, the Habib Bank Limited will also provide support to its staff that has been affected by this disaster.
Editor’s Note: The Aga Khan Development Network’s (AKDN) activities in Pakistan encompass cultural, economic and social development and include microfinance, agricultural programmes, health, and education, the introduction of clean-water supplies and sanitation facilities, construction of mini hydro-electric plants, the improvement of public open spaces, community-driven village rehabilitation and house renovation. The Network is a group of private, non-denominational development agencies and institutions that seek to empower communities and individuals, often in disadvantaged circumstances, to improve living conditions and opportunities in specific regions of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Active in over 30 countries, the Network's underlying ethic is compassion for the vulnerable in society. Its agencies and institutions work for the common good of all citizens, regardless of origin, gender or religion.
This is a video clip of the relief efforts of Focus Humanitarian.
Click here: CNN.com Video
http://www.cnn.com/video/player/player. ... f.cnn&wm=8
Click here: CNN.com Video
http://www.cnn.com/video/player/player. ... f.cnn&wm=8
FOCUS video of Pakistan relief
Thanks for posting that video.
The valley of deathMoscow correspondent Graeme Smith was the first outsider to reach the quake-ravaged village of Suwan last week By GRAEME SMITH
Saturday, October 22, 2005 Posted at 3:07 AM EDT
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
SUWAN, PAKISTAN — In a hail of flying rocks, while the earth broke and fell hundreds of metres into the valley below, Sabir Hussain Shah took a giant leap.
The 40-year-old threw himself across a freshly opened crevice to save his children as they screamed on a mountain ledge during the earthquake that ravaged this remote part of Pakistan two weeks ago today.
Now, Mr. Shah is preparing for a leap that frightens him vastly more. As a leader in the village of Suwan, Pakistan, and a great-great-grandson of the warlord who founded the remote settlement almost two centuries ago, Mr. Shah is trying to persuade his neighbours to abandon this place.
“There is no life here any more,” Mr. Shah said, standing on a footpath overlooking the ruined houses and cornfields on carved shelves in the mountains.
The landslides and collapsing homes killed 24 of Suwan's 700 villagers.
In the first days, the survivors didn't have a moment to think about anything except digging for bodies, building shelters, and foraging for buried food. They clawed at the mud with their bare hands and slept in the rain.
Now, the men who poke through the rubble for useful items have slowed their work. The ones who push boulders off the narrow paths are leaning idly on their tools. Everybody squats among splintered beams and shattered rocks, talking quietly and seriously.
They love their village, with its rich soil and pure water from nearby glaciers. But there is little of what they used to call home left: The landslides washed away 90 per cent of the homes, 60 per cent of the livestock, and most of the stores of food. Their tools are buried and their water pipes broken.
Worst of all, the obliterated paths leave them almost completely cut off from the world. When a foreign reporter arrived in the village about a week after the earthquake they had received no help whatsoever.
This isolation threatens to destroy them. Dozens suffered injuries during the tremors, and their wounds are festering. The others have only a few precious weeks to build shelters and store food before heavy snows arrive next month.
As aftershocks continue and the days pass without help, the United Nations World Food Programme reports that tens of thousands of people from these mountains are descending into the valleys in search of food and shelter.
Deciding whether to join the exodus, the villagers say, is heartbreaking.
A bird named chikoor lives in this region, Mr. Shah said. It's like a pheasant without the long tail, mottled brown and black, with a song like a woman's laughter. This bird is famous because it loves the moon. It loves the moon so much that it will fly straight toward a full moon and keep going, flying ever higher, until it gets so cold and tired that it dies.
“We have great love for this village,” Mr. Shah said. “But we do not want to be chikoor.”
Members of the Shah family have lived on this mountain since 1832, when a Muslim chieftain named Zaamin Shah built a fort on a rocky promontory with a strategic view of the Kaghan Valley.
This was about a decade after Ranjit Singh, a Sikh king, swept into the area as part of his campaign to build a vast Kingdom of the Punjab. Muslim warriors fought many battles against the Sikh conqueror, and Zaamin Shah was able to defend a small territory against the Sikhs from behind the thick stone walls of his outpost here.
Upon his death, Zaamin Shah gave each of his seven sons a piece of land, and four of the sons chose to build their homes on the steep slopes around the fortress.
In the 1850s the Punjabi kingdom was falling apart, and the sons made a deal with the Sikh rulers: Leave us alone, don't ask for taxes, and we will take care of ourselves in peace.
Through the years, under many governments, this remained the village code. The Shahs flourished, along with their crops of potatoes, corn, and wheat. They raised livestock, kept bees, and wove their own clothing.
Two other major families settled alongside the Shahs, and they hired labourers for their farms. The population swelled to 4,000. Elders describe the place as a paradise, full of apricot trees, grape vines, and sugar cane.
But recent generations haven't seen as much potential in Suwan. The surrounding forest has thinned as villagers foraged for building materials and firewood; at 2,000 metres above sea level, it's too remote to be reached by recent developments such as roads and electrical lines. When news reaches Suwan — via BBC radio, or stale newspapers — it advertises a life in which people don't have to hack a mountain with pickaxes to carve out patches of farmland.
In recent years, the village has dwindled to less than a quarter of its previous size.
Those who remain have relaxed their historic independence. For more than a century, the only commodity Suwan required from the outside world was salt.
Four years ago, however, Pakistan's expanding road network reached a nearby town and brought cheap goods to the stores.
Villagers in Suwan stopped making clothing, cultivating honey, grapes, apricots, and wheat; they started raising livestock instead, walking the animals across the narrow mountain paths to sell them at market.
Those paths are now blocked by boulders, and many of their livestock are rotting in ravines or collapsed cattle sheds. The smell sometimes wafts up into the village, scenting the clean mountain air with a reminder of death.
The Urdu term for earthquake is zalzala, but nobody here uses that word when talking about Oct. 8. Almost every villager calls it Qayamat: the Apocalypse, or Judgment Day.
When it struck, Sabir Hussain Shah was halfway down the steep path from his home to the village below. The shocks threw him to the ground, and for a moment he could do nothing but watch the terrible scene.
“In front of my eyes, I saw a big chunk of the mountain fall away,” he said. “Across the valley, I saw houses collapsing and crushed by rubble.”
Then Mr. Shah remembered his children, 11 and 14, playing with three young friends under a walnut tree several hundred metres away. A few minutes earlier they had been sitting in patch of grass, flicking walnuts with their fingers in a traditional game similar to marbles. Now they were wailing for help.
Mr. Shah ran toward them, across the stubble of a recently harvested cornfield. Rocks the size of cows were tumbling down the slope. He would pause every few steps to avoid debris, and often fell to his knees as the mountain shook.
The earth cracked again, opening a jagged crevice in front of him. To his left was a sheer drop into the valley below; to his right was a steep cliff. It was hard to see the way forward, he said, as landslides threw dirt into the air.
“All the dust made the sky dark, even though the sun was up,” he said.
Blindly scrabbling further up the mountain, Mr. Shah went around the crevice and threw himself down to the children on the grassy ledge. Then he heaved them, one by one, to safety above and climbed after them.
He took them to his home, the largest in the village, a 10-room structure near the top of a bluff. But the house was gone, except for a wooden door still standing among some protruding beams.
So they started back down toward the village.
On the way, they passed a spot where a landslide blocked the route with stones and grassy chunks of earth. A man was lying there, Mr. Shah said, clearly dead.
His head was smashed and blood soaked the dirt. But he was still clutching a tuft of grass, as though trying to keep his grip on this mountain, trying to hold his place on the earth.
Everybody in Suwan has been holding on, in their own way, since the tremors. The first three days were the hardest, as they dug for survivors and found mostly dead. Men in the village can be seen wearing dirty rags tied around their fingers or thumbs, hiding the cuts and scrapes they got from excavating homes with their hands.
Only four of the village's 54 house remain standing, and they are so badly damaged that people fear sleeping inside them.
On the first night, after a day of digging, men built a bonfire on one of the village's broadest ledges and collapsed into sleep in the frigid open air. The women crowded into the only tent they could find on that first night. It was an old military tent, made of waxed canvas and full of holes, donated to the village after another earthquake three years ago. Somebody had discovered it amid the ruins of the school. So many women pushed inside that they were forced to sleep sitting up, in each other's laps.
It was a windy night, and groups of men took turns staying awake and holding the tent poles upright. A fine drizzle fell on them, and aftershocks rumbled through the valley.
That night was much harder on the slopes surrounding the village, where many people had no help from their neighbours. Khelil-ur-Rahman, 47, spent the first day pawing at the mud roof of his house, trying to find his family.
At first he was guided by the whimpering of his brown-eyed daughter Kinza, 5, who kept repeating that she wouldn't be a bad girl if she could only get free.
He found her almost unhurt, except for a smashed finger.
“She looked like a mud statue when I pulled her out,” Mr. Rahman said.
He kept digging, at first with his hands and later with a garden hoe and a pickaxe.
He did not stop, he said, until he found the bodies of his other daughter, his granddaughter, and his daughter-in-law.
“I did not eat or drink the whole time,” he said. “There was no question of sleep.”
Muslims bury their dead quickly, to free the souls. As soon as Mr. Rahman had unearthed his family he started digging their graves, not far from the resting place of his wife who died a year ago during childbirth. Before sunset on Sunday, the second day after the quake, his neighbour had performed the rites of washing the bodies, shrouding them and placing them in the ground.
Mr. Rahman spoke the usual prayers. But as he stood on the mountain ledge beside three fresh burial mounds, he added a request to the heavens.
“I made a special prayer: ‘Oh, God, stop this land from shivering.' ”
It hasn't stopped. As Mr. Rahman showed visitors his ruined home this week, another powerful tremor sent pieces of rock cascading down the mountain.
Villagers say they have trouble sleeping while the ground shifts beneath them. Even their cows and goats are skittish; the ordinary clatter of stones makes the animals quiver.
These are tough people. They've survived landslides, storms and droughts.
But these two weeks after the earthquake have sorely tested their ruggedness. Many of them still wear the same filthy clothing they had when the landslides took their homes; sleeping outside, or under makeshift shelters, they can feel the winter approaching. Cattle have already started to die of the cold, because they're no longer sheltered in sheds.
Villagers' eyes widen with fear when they talk about the winter. Usually they would keep enough food to last through the worst of the cold months, and the snow that gathers up to 2½ metres deep.
But now those carefully hoarded boxes of grain and bags of flour have been destroyed or spoiled. Many of their cornfields were ripe for harvesting before they were swept away.
Feroze Shah, 50, survived the earthquake along with all nine members of his closest family members, but he fears they won't survive the next season. They lost all their food, along with much of their livestock and crops. “We have four kilos of wheat, and four kilos of corn flour,” he said. “But it's mixed with mud. We cannot live through the winter.”
Some farmers haven't given up. They're harvesting as best they can, often without tools, piling corn cobs on ragged blankets to dry in the sun. They're rebuilding storage sheds with rocks, and gathering fodder for the animals that survived. Others pick apples and gather walnuts.
Even while they work hard, however, many of them admit it's not enough. Leaders of the village have chosen young men to seek help in nearby towns; with the usual paths blocked by landslides, it's a hard day of scrambling across the mountains to reach the nearest grocery store.
These trips haven't been fruitful. A man sent to buy wheat flour returned empty-handed, because the shop shelves were bare. One man found a vendor but discovered that the prices were inflated; another reported that the stores had collapsed. These young adventurers bring back discouraging news, telling stories of devastation far worse than the damage in Suwan.
Some people are already abandoning the town, packing their meagre possessions into plastic shopping bags and setting off into the hills.
But most of them prefer to stay with their friends and family; if they leave, they will all leave together.
This has caused some debate about how to transport children, the sick and the elderly across difficult terrain. Badly injured people would be impossible to carry; at one point this week, Noor Aalam, 59, suggested that he may have to allow his 75-year-old mother, Wahab Noor, to simply die because there was no way of getting treatment for her broken ribs and smashed cheek.
As they consider the idea of a new home, the villagers also talk about whether to move permanently.
“It's a very common debate here,” said Bashir Hussein Shah, 55, another descendant of the town's original family. “Before this quake, we liked the village. But after all these hardships, everything we suffered, we feel stranded. We fear for our future here.”
This week, Sabir Hussain Shah had an idea. He crushed some white, chalky rocks and mixed the powder with water. On a broad plateau high above the village, he dribbled the paint in a large circle and drew a capital H inside. He marked the improvised heli-pad with a red flag.
At first, the results were mixed. A small Pakistani helicopter arrived the next day and dropped off two journalists, but no supplies. A rumour spread, suggesting that more flights would arrive very soon. People from nearby mountains started gathering in search of help.
When Mr. Shah tried to explain that he didn't know whether more helicopters were coming, fistfights broke out. Villagers pounded and shoved each other, filling the quiet slopes with the sounds of desperate voices and thin fists hitting starved ribs.
The despair only deepened later in the week, when a large Pakistani helicopter hovered over the area, searching for a place to land on the narrow steps, and finally retreated.
On Friday morning, two white helicopters operated by the Aga Khan Foundation circled the village. Mr. Shah threw green weeds on a signal fire, sending up a white plum of smoke, and villagers waved frantically.
The white helicopters touched down and unloaded 25 tents, food, medicines, and other supplies. It was the first assistance for the village since the earthquake; not enough to keep them through the winter, not enough to repair their shaken faith in the village life, but perhaps enough to give them a little time to make decision about their future.
Weeping men loaded injured people, including Mrs. Noor, into the helicopters.
Waqas Mahmood, a manager at the Aga Khan Foundation, cradled a sick child in his arms and looked out of the helicopter window as it climbed into the sky. Far below, the green peaks of northern Pakistan were dotted with hundreds of settlements like Suwan.
“There are just too many of these places,” Mr. Mahmood said. “We're not going to reach all of them.”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ ... rnational/
Saturday, October 22, 2005 Posted at 3:07 AM EDT
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
SUWAN, PAKISTAN — In a hail of flying rocks, while the earth broke and fell hundreds of metres into the valley below, Sabir Hussain Shah took a giant leap.
The 40-year-old threw himself across a freshly opened crevice to save his children as they screamed on a mountain ledge during the earthquake that ravaged this remote part of Pakistan two weeks ago today.
Now, Mr. Shah is preparing for a leap that frightens him vastly more. As a leader in the village of Suwan, Pakistan, and a great-great-grandson of the warlord who founded the remote settlement almost two centuries ago, Mr. Shah is trying to persuade his neighbours to abandon this place.
“There is no life here any more,” Mr. Shah said, standing on a footpath overlooking the ruined houses and cornfields on carved shelves in the mountains.
The landslides and collapsing homes killed 24 of Suwan's 700 villagers.
In the first days, the survivors didn't have a moment to think about anything except digging for bodies, building shelters, and foraging for buried food. They clawed at the mud with their bare hands and slept in the rain.
Now, the men who poke through the rubble for useful items have slowed their work. The ones who push boulders off the narrow paths are leaning idly on their tools. Everybody squats among splintered beams and shattered rocks, talking quietly and seriously.
They love their village, with its rich soil and pure water from nearby glaciers. But there is little of what they used to call home left: The landslides washed away 90 per cent of the homes, 60 per cent of the livestock, and most of the stores of food. Their tools are buried and their water pipes broken.
Worst of all, the obliterated paths leave them almost completely cut off from the world. When a foreign reporter arrived in the village about a week after the earthquake they had received no help whatsoever.
This isolation threatens to destroy them. Dozens suffered injuries during the tremors, and their wounds are festering. The others have only a few precious weeks to build shelters and store food before heavy snows arrive next month.
As aftershocks continue and the days pass without help, the United Nations World Food Programme reports that tens of thousands of people from these mountains are descending into the valleys in search of food and shelter.
Deciding whether to join the exodus, the villagers say, is heartbreaking.
A bird named chikoor lives in this region, Mr. Shah said. It's like a pheasant without the long tail, mottled brown and black, with a song like a woman's laughter. This bird is famous because it loves the moon. It loves the moon so much that it will fly straight toward a full moon and keep going, flying ever higher, until it gets so cold and tired that it dies.
“We have great love for this village,” Mr. Shah said. “But we do not want to be chikoor.”
Members of the Shah family have lived on this mountain since 1832, when a Muslim chieftain named Zaamin Shah built a fort on a rocky promontory with a strategic view of the Kaghan Valley.
This was about a decade after Ranjit Singh, a Sikh king, swept into the area as part of his campaign to build a vast Kingdom of the Punjab. Muslim warriors fought many battles against the Sikh conqueror, and Zaamin Shah was able to defend a small territory against the Sikhs from behind the thick stone walls of his outpost here.
Upon his death, Zaamin Shah gave each of his seven sons a piece of land, and four of the sons chose to build their homes on the steep slopes around the fortress.
In the 1850s the Punjabi kingdom was falling apart, and the sons made a deal with the Sikh rulers: Leave us alone, don't ask for taxes, and we will take care of ourselves in peace.
Through the years, under many governments, this remained the village code. The Shahs flourished, along with their crops of potatoes, corn, and wheat. They raised livestock, kept bees, and wove their own clothing.
Two other major families settled alongside the Shahs, and they hired labourers for their farms. The population swelled to 4,000. Elders describe the place as a paradise, full of apricot trees, grape vines, and sugar cane.
But recent generations haven't seen as much potential in Suwan. The surrounding forest has thinned as villagers foraged for building materials and firewood; at 2,000 metres above sea level, it's too remote to be reached by recent developments such as roads and electrical lines. When news reaches Suwan — via BBC radio, or stale newspapers — it advertises a life in which people don't have to hack a mountain with pickaxes to carve out patches of farmland.
In recent years, the village has dwindled to less than a quarter of its previous size.
Those who remain have relaxed their historic independence. For more than a century, the only commodity Suwan required from the outside world was salt.
Four years ago, however, Pakistan's expanding road network reached a nearby town and brought cheap goods to the stores.
Villagers in Suwan stopped making clothing, cultivating honey, grapes, apricots, and wheat; they started raising livestock instead, walking the animals across the narrow mountain paths to sell them at market.
Those paths are now blocked by boulders, and many of their livestock are rotting in ravines or collapsed cattle sheds. The smell sometimes wafts up into the village, scenting the clean mountain air with a reminder of death.
The Urdu term for earthquake is zalzala, but nobody here uses that word when talking about Oct. 8. Almost every villager calls it Qayamat: the Apocalypse, or Judgment Day.
When it struck, Sabir Hussain Shah was halfway down the steep path from his home to the village below. The shocks threw him to the ground, and for a moment he could do nothing but watch the terrible scene.
“In front of my eyes, I saw a big chunk of the mountain fall away,” he said. “Across the valley, I saw houses collapsing and crushed by rubble.”
Then Mr. Shah remembered his children, 11 and 14, playing with three young friends under a walnut tree several hundred metres away. A few minutes earlier they had been sitting in patch of grass, flicking walnuts with their fingers in a traditional game similar to marbles. Now they were wailing for help.
Mr. Shah ran toward them, across the stubble of a recently harvested cornfield. Rocks the size of cows were tumbling down the slope. He would pause every few steps to avoid debris, and often fell to his knees as the mountain shook.
The earth cracked again, opening a jagged crevice in front of him. To his left was a sheer drop into the valley below; to his right was a steep cliff. It was hard to see the way forward, he said, as landslides threw dirt into the air.
“All the dust made the sky dark, even though the sun was up,” he said.
Blindly scrabbling further up the mountain, Mr. Shah went around the crevice and threw himself down to the children on the grassy ledge. Then he heaved them, one by one, to safety above and climbed after them.
He took them to his home, the largest in the village, a 10-room structure near the top of a bluff. But the house was gone, except for a wooden door still standing among some protruding beams.
So they started back down toward the village.
On the way, they passed a spot where a landslide blocked the route with stones and grassy chunks of earth. A man was lying there, Mr. Shah said, clearly dead.
His head was smashed and blood soaked the dirt. But he was still clutching a tuft of grass, as though trying to keep his grip on this mountain, trying to hold his place on the earth.
Everybody in Suwan has been holding on, in their own way, since the tremors. The first three days were the hardest, as they dug for survivors and found mostly dead. Men in the village can be seen wearing dirty rags tied around their fingers or thumbs, hiding the cuts and scrapes they got from excavating homes with their hands.
Only four of the village's 54 house remain standing, and they are so badly damaged that people fear sleeping inside them.
On the first night, after a day of digging, men built a bonfire on one of the village's broadest ledges and collapsed into sleep in the frigid open air. The women crowded into the only tent they could find on that first night. It was an old military tent, made of waxed canvas and full of holes, donated to the village after another earthquake three years ago. Somebody had discovered it amid the ruins of the school. So many women pushed inside that they were forced to sleep sitting up, in each other's laps.
It was a windy night, and groups of men took turns staying awake and holding the tent poles upright. A fine drizzle fell on them, and aftershocks rumbled through the valley.
That night was much harder on the slopes surrounding the village, where many people had no help from their neighbours. Khelil-ur-Rahman, 47, spent the first day pawing at the mud roof of his house, trying to find his family.
At first he was guided by the whimpering of his brown-eyed daughter Kinza, 5, who kept repeating that she wouldn't be a bad girl if she could only get free.
He found her almost unhurt, except for a smashed finger.
“She looked like a mud statue when I pulled her out,” Mr. Rahman said.
He kept digging, at first with his hands and later with a garden hoe and a pickaxe.
He did not stop, he said, until he found the bodies of his other daughter, his granddaughter, and his daughter-in-law.
“I did not eat or drink the whole time,” he said. “There was no question of sleep.”
Muslims bury their dead quickly, to free the souls. As soon as Mr. Rahman had unearthed his family he started digging their graves, not far from the resting place of his wife who died a year ago during childbirth. Before sunset on Sunday, the second day after the quake, his neighbour had performed the rites of washing the bodies, shrouding them and placing them in the ground.
Mr. Rahman spoke the usual prayers. But as he stood on the mountain ledge beside three fresh burial mounds, he added a request to the heavens.
“I made a special prayer: ‘Oh, God, stop this land from shivering.' ”
It hasn't stopped. As Mr. Rahman showed visitors his ruined home this week, another powerful tremor sent pieces of rock cascading down the mountain.
Villagers say they have trouble sleeping while the ground shifts beneath them. Even their cows and goats are skittish; the ordinary clatter of stones makes the animals quiver.
These are tough people. They've survived landslides, storms and droughts.
But these two weeks after the earthquake have sorely tested their ruggedness. Many of them still wear the same filthy clothing they had when the landslides took their homes; sleeping outside, or under makeshift shelters, they can feel the winter approaching. Cattle have already started to die of the cold, because they're no longer sheltered in sheds.
Villagers' eyes widen with fear when they talk about the winter. Usually they would keep enough food to last through the worst of the cold months, and the snow that gathers up to 2½ metres deep.
But now those carefully hoarded boxes of grain and bags of flour have been destroyed or spoiled. Many of their cornfields were ripe for harvesting before they were swept away.
Feroze Shah, 50, survived the earthquake along with all nine members of his closest family members, but he fears they won't survive the next season. They lost all their food, along with much of their livestock and crops. “We have four kilos of wheat, and four kilos of corn flour,” he said. “But it's mixed with mud. We cannot live through the winter.”
Some farmers haven't given up. They're harvesting as best they can, often without tools, piling corn cobs on ragged blankets to dry in the sun. They're rebuilding storage sheds with rocks, and gathering fodder for the animals that survived. Others pick apples and gather walnuts.
Even while they work hard, however, many of them admit it's not enough. Leaders of the village have chosen young men to seek help in nearby towns; with the usual paths blocked by landslides, it's a hard day of scrambling across the mountains to reach the nearest grocery store.
These trips haven't been fruitful. A man sent to buy wheat flour returned empty-handed, because the shop shelves were bare. One man found a vendor but discovered that the prices were inflated; another reported that the stores had collapsed. These young adventurers bring back discouraging news, telling stories of devastation far worse than the damage in Suwan.
Some people are already abandoning the town, packing their meagre possessions into plastic shopping bags and setting off into the hills.
But most of them prefer to stay with their friends and family; if they leave, they will all leave together.
This has caused some debate about how to transport children, the sick and the elderly across difficult terrain. Badly injured people would be impossible to carry; at one point this week, Noor Aalam, 59, suggested that he may have to allow his 75-year-old mother, Wahab Noor, to simply die because there was no way of getting treatment for her broken ribs and smashed cheek.
As they consider the idea of a new home, the villagers also talk about whether to move permanently.
“It's a very common debate here,” said Bashir Hussein Shah, 55, another descendant of the town's original family. “Before this quake, we liked the village. But after all these hardships, everything we suffered, we feel stranded. We fear for our future here.”
This week, Sabir Hussain Shah had an idea. He crushed some white, chalky rocks and mixed the powder with water. On a broad plateau high above the village, he dribbled the paint in a large circle and drew a capital H inside. He marked the improvised heli-pad with a red flag.
At first, the results were mixed. A small Pakistani helicopter arrived the next day and dropped off two journalists, but no supplies. A rumour spread, suggesting that more flights would arrive very soon. People from nearby mountains started gathering in search of help.
When Mr. Shah tried to explain that he didn't know whether more helicopters were coming, fistfights broke out. Villagers pounded and shoved each other, filling the quiet slopes with the sounds of desperate voices and thin fists hitting starved ribs.
The despair only deepened later in the week, when a large Pakistani helicopter hovered over the area, searching for a place to land on the narrow steps, and finally retreated.
On Friday morning, two white helicopters operated by the Aga Khan Foundation circled the village. Mr. Shah threw green weeds on a signal fire, sending up a white plum of smoke, and villagers waved frantically.
The white helicopters touched down and unloaded 25 tents, food, medicines, and other supplies. It was the first assistance for the village since the earthquake; not enough to keep them through the winter, not enough to repair their shaken faith in the village life, but perhaps enough to give them a little time to make decision about their future.
Weeping men loaded injured people, including Mrs. Noor, into the helicopters.
Waqas Mahmood, a manager at the Aga Khan Foundation, cradled a sick child in his arms and looked out of the helicopter window as it climbed into the sky. Far below, the green peaks of northern Pakistan were dotted with hundreds of settlements like Suwan.
“There are just too many of these places,” Mr. Mahmood said. “We're not going to reach all of them.”
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The Aga Khan to visit Pakistan
CHITRAL, 18 Oct 05: Prince Karim Aga Khan, spiritual leader of the Ismaili Muslims worldwide, is to pay a visit to Islamabad shortly, Chitral News learned from reliable sources Monday. The visit of the Aga Khan is primarily aimed at expressing solidarity with the government and people of Pakistan in their hour of bereavement. He is expected to announce his personal contribution towards the alleviation of miseries of the earthquake afflicted people, during his meeting with the the President and the Prime Minister. The Aga Khan is a world renowned Philanthropist who's organisations are actively involved in carrying out welfare projects in many parts of the world including Northern Pakistan.
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CHITRAL, 18 Oct 05: Prince Karim Aga Khan, spiritual leader of the Ismaili Muslims worldwide, is to pay a visit to Islamabad shortly, Chitral News learned from reliable sources Monday. The visit of the Aga Khan is primarily aimed at expressing solidarity with the government and people of Pakistan in their hour of bereavement. He is expected to announce his personal contribution towards the alleviation of miseries of the earthquake afflicted people, during his meeting with the the President and the Prime Minister. The Aga Khan is a world renowned Philanthropist who's organisations are actively involved in carrying out welfare projects in many parts of the world including Northern Pakistan.
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That helicopter (Bell/Agusta AB 139) was featured in the Sept issue ForbesFYI and it does mention AKDN!kmaherali wrote:This is a video clip of the relief efforts of Focus Humanitarian.
Click here: CNN.com Video
http://www.cnn.com/video/player/player. ... f.cnn&wm=8