Opinion - News Analysis   

A year after, survivors struggle on

Nirupama Subramanian

The signature of the October 2005 earthquake is still evident in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir — in the way mountains have caved in, in the rubble of destroyed homes piled up on the mountain sides, and in the sorrow underneath the stoicism of the survivors.

THE GARDEZI family had the biggest house in Mujhoi village.

"Thirteen rooms, three verandahs, two kitchens, two bathrooms. It was nice," recalls Nagma Wajahat Gardezi with a wistful smile. Her family and the families of her husband's two brothers all lived in the same house.

It was also the best-constructed house in the village, on a hill slope in Muzaffarabad district of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. But that was no use on October 8, 2005, when the earthquake struck and reduced their home to rubble along with every other in the village.

"We are fortunate to have escaped with our lives," said Ms. Gardezi. Many others were not. The statistics are up on a board in the village. Population before earthquake: 1,035; after earthquake: 1,000; widowed: 17; orphaned: 35.

The earthquake killed 80,000 people in Pakistan, mainly in PoK and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and left millions homeless. In Muzaffarabad district, a year later, the signature of the killer quake is still very much evident, sometimes spectacularly, in the way mountains have caved in, and sometimes silently, in the rubble of destroyed homes piled up on the mountain sides, and in the sorrow underneath the stoicism of the survivors.

In the language of disaster management workers, Mujhoi suffered "100 per cent damage to housing." The people of the village live in tents as they construct what United Nations relief agencies call transitional homes — sheds with roofs of corrugated galvanised iron sheets — that can make another fast approaching winter look bearable.

The Gardezis have already moved into their wooden shed, small in comparison to the house they lost but much better than a tent. They and other families in the village look forward to the day when they will once again have permanent homes, something that could take years.

"In three years, we will be able to reconstruct the public sector. But there is a grey area of major concern, and that is housing. But we are planning and proceeding accordingly. People may have schools, offices and hospitals but it is nothing if they do not have any housing," said Siddiq Khan, director-general, SERRA, in PoK at a briefing for journalists on a U.N. organised trip to the region recently.

As many as 200,000 houses need to be reconstructed in the region. According to Mr. Khan, a recent survey showed 40 per cent of the houses that needed reconstruction were those that had been totally destroyed in the earthquake, while the rest were partially damaged. He said most people had begun reconstruction in the rural areas but, unfortunately, at least half the houses being rebuilt were not according to the earthquake-resistant design that the Government was trying to enforce.

In the urban areas, SERRA halted all rebuilding activity until the announcement of a construction code. Residents of Muzaffarabad town whose houses were damaged or destroyed moved in with relatives and friends or into rented accommodation in less affected parts of the city. A year later, there is still no code. But residents were recently told they could begin reconstruction as long as their plans were approved, giving rise to more confusion than reassurance.

Victim-survivors are dissatisfied and angry with the apparently slow pace of government. But Mr. Khan warned that "the magnitude of the disaster was so great that the task could take as many as 15 years" and "maybe even 80-100 years."

As the first anniversary of the earthquake and another winter approach, the biggest concern of aid agencies is the large numbers of people who are still living in tents in relief camps. SERRA is still formulating a winter contingency plan.

Harsh test

According to the U.N. resident co-ordinator in Pakistan, Jan Vandermoortele, there are 33,000 people living in the camps, of which nearly 30,000 are in PoK alone.

At a recent press conference, he said the coming winter would be a severe test on the health facilities of the aid agencies as most of the foreign health teams had gone home and the infrastructure that existed prior to the earthquake remained in a state of collapse.

"Our health sector is not among the best funded. If we get a really bad winter it will be a severe test for the health sector to face. So we have to be ready for that," he said.

Mr. Vandermoortele said the U.N. had asked donors to provide additional funding, medicines, equipment, and medical personnel to respond to possible epidemics between December and January.

With the winter, an additional 20,000 to 30,000 people are expected to come down the slopes and back into the camps. It is clear that even for those people who went back to their villages, life is far from back to normal. Many are still in the process of building shelters, and even if they have built them, their access to food and medicare could get problematic in the winter.

Access to fuel for cooking and heating is another problem, although in some places, such as Mujhoi village, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has distributed "cooking-heating" kits — a double burner stove and a 11.8 kg LPG cylinder, for which they have to buy their own Rs. 700 refills.

They would have liked free refills. But with few trees left on the mountains after the earthquake, a fear of going to hunt for firewood on the jumbled up slopes, and the slowly spreading awareness that denuding them could cause disasters, the new stoves seem like a better option anyway. Women have been forcing their husbands to save for up to three refills a month.

With winter weeks away, there is a huge demand for the kits, but the U.N.'s $ 5 million scheme has covered only 42,000 households across PoK and the NWFP.

Up against insufficient aid and a slow-moving government machinery, it is finally their own resilience that people fall back upon.

As Riffat Bibi, a teacher at a newly set up UNICEF tent school in the Jhelum Valley — the original had collapsed killing one of its 57 students — put it: "There is no point in going over what has happened. We have the task of starting over, and there is no choice but to take up the challenge."

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