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Paradise Lostby Peter Koch |
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The valleys and foothills of Northern Pakistan’s Hindu Kush form a ruggedly beautiful landscape. Carved out of the world’s tallest mountains by roaring, ice-cold rivers, the steep-sided valleys have served as a home and refuge to a variety of people for thousands of years. The lower valleys could almost be Switzerland, the way the evergreens line alpine wildflower meadows. On the morning of October 8, however, a 7.6 magnitude earthquake rocked the entire region for 30 long seconds, forever altering the landscape and transforming it into an unforgiving hell for millions of Pakistanis.
Within hours of the initial tragedy, the entire world heard the news: whole cities and villages leveled; untold thousands dead, buried beneath the rubble of collapsed buildings; tens of thousands injured and cut off from relief in places like Muzaffarabad, Balakot and Bagh. While these names are unfamililar to most WNYers, they are all too close to home for many local Pakistani-Americans. In fact, many originally hail from those regions and are still waiting to hear from loved ones.
“My own family has been affected by this,” says Mahmud Hashmi, an engineer from North Tonawanda. “Two sisters-in-law are missing. One is now confirmed dead and her six-year-old son is gone, too. The roof of the house fell on top of both of them. The three other children in the family have fractured legs.” Hashmi and his wife Usfer tried getting in touch with family members in the earthquake area for five days before they received any news. “My wife is very upset, and when she is upset, everyone in the house is upset. It’s even hard to eat something, because you feel so guilty. They have nothing there [Pakistan] and here we are in luxury.”
Hashmi is not alone, though. Almost every Pakistani-American in WNY (there are several hundred) knows somebody who’s been affected by the earthquake and has strong emotional ties to the affected regions.
Israr Abassi grew up in Muzaffarabad, which he remembers as “probably the prettiest place in the world, as serene as Denver, CO or Yosemite.” Abassi, an active member of a charity called Human Development Foundation, has been working with that group for several years getting schools built in that region. Now the Jamestown resident feels like they’re back to square one. “Suddenly everything is gone there. It’s something that I still haven’t been able to come to come to grips with.”
A Race Against Time
Two large aftershocks hit on the morning of October 19, raising the death toll close to 80,000, with casualties almost equally split between Northwest Frontier Province and Pakistani-administered Kashmir, or Azad Kashmir (Indian-controlled Kashmir also reported about 1,300 deaths). Estimates on the number left homeless range as high as 3.3 million.
Fresh snow rests on the mountaintops overlooking the villages and the winter winds are bearing down on the lower hilltops, making shelter for those left homeless by the earthquake a priority. But the harsh southern Himalayan landscape, where some mountains soar higher than 20,000 feet, is severely hampering relief efforts. There are very few roads connecting the far-flung villages in Northwest Frontier Province and Azad Kashmir. Many of those that do exist have been blocked by landslides, causing huge bottlenecking of relief supplies. About 70 percent of the population doesn’t even live along the main roads, instead living in mud huts upon the hills, where they have to walk an hour or more to reach main arteries. As of Tuesday—ten days after the earthquake—the UN’s World Food Programme said that 500,000 survivors still hadn’t been reached by relief workers. Most relief has been focused in the population centers, like Muzaffarabad. Mules are being used to deliver goods to some villages, but many villagers are being forced to walk to the cities to find relief and for medical attention. Northern Pakistan simply doesn’t have infrastructure in place to deal with such large-scale disasters. In the case of this earthquake, more than 15,000 villages have been affected. On top of that, frequent storms have battered the exposed survivors and grounded rescue helicopters. Assuming they can be properly distributed, the most important relief items needed are tents, blankets and sleeping bags. Andrew Macleod, operations manager of the UN Emergency Response Team, told the BBC this week that “the need here is greater than the existence of tents in the world.” He also went on to say that the scope of the emergency was even greater than that created by last December’s tsunami.
An Entire Generation
One of the hardest parts of the earthquake emergency is the sheer number of children who have died. In many of the outlying villages, large concrete schools collapsed, killing hundreds of children in an instant. Parents rushed to the schools when the quake hit, but there was little they could do, since most villages don’t have heavy machinery. Still, many parents clawed desparately at the wreckage, hopelessly attempting to move the huge concrete slabs. Many villages have simply lost what seems like an entire generation to this earthquake.
Those children who did survive the initial earthquake are in the most danger until adequate food and shelter arrives, as children are more susceptible to hypothermia and pneumonia than adults. Hundreds have reportedly died already from exposure.
It’s impossible to say how long rebuilding will take in Northwest Frontier Province and Azad Kashmir. The areas that were most affected by the earthquake have already been ravaged for years by political and religious strife. Islamic Pakistan and Hindu India have fought intermittently over the Islamic state of Kashmir since 1947, when India won independence from Great Britain. Since 1990, at least 34,000 from both sides have died in the conflict, and both sides have exhausted countless supplies.
Also, more earthquakes are likely to hit the region in the not-so-far-off future. In fact, the Pakistani earthquake came as little surprise to seismologists. It’s been in the works for 150 million years, since the Indian subcontinent broke free from Antarctica and started its slow, deliberate northward drift. It crashed into Asia 50 million years ago, pushing up the Himalayan Mountains. That fault is still one of the most active in the world, with India sliding beneath the enormous Eurasian Plate at a rate of over an inch per year. What’s surprising is that although this was the world’s deadliest earthquake in 30 years, it was smaller than seismologists were expecting from this fault and didn’t account for most of the tectonic movement there. In other words, expect a much bigger one in the future.
It’s for all these reasons that Pakistan needs all the help it can get rebuilding. Unfortunately, though, donations for the earthquake are falling well short of those given for the tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, according to the American Red Cross and the World Food Program.
Faizan Haq, Vice President of the Pakistani-American Association of Western New York (PAAWNY), says, “Why is it only with disaster that we understand the suffering of human beings? I think it is a test of our humanity. Let’s get going. Let’s get help to those who need it, and let’s make a long commitment to help.”
PAAWNY is holding an earthquake relief fundraiser tonight at the Heim Road Islamic Center (details below), and has also started a relief fund. Donations can be made by sending checks (made out to “PAAWNY Earthquake Relief Fund”) to Masroor Syed, 5573 Woods Edge Court, Williamsville, NY 14221. Also, donations can be given to Human Development Foundation at www.yespakistan.com.
To respond to this article, send e-mail to editorial@artvoice.com.
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