One Year Later

This is an article that I wrote for Tearfund's website. Since I haven't posted anything in months I thought I'd add it to the blog, since it gives a good taste of where we are and what we've done. An edited version will appear on the Tearfund website (click HERE for link to it). This one's more colourful. - rjs

I’m driving up into the Bagh hills with Sardar again, nine months after I arrived in Pakistan, nearly 12 months after the earthquake. Last time there was snow still lingering on the bare tops of the mountains above us and this time there is the taste of fall in the breezes that tease us through the open windows of the double-cabin Toyota. In the nine months between trips, Sardar has traded his prayer hat for a white painter’s cap with a UNICEF crest, propped comically on his head. That hasn’t changed. With his moustaches, drooping eyelids, balding head and crinkly smile, he still makes me think of a comic Hercule Poirot. When he first took me out in January we were surveying the damage for a water and sanitation project, climbing around the hills to inspect storage tanks and measure water flow. This time we’re going to see what we’ve built.
I don’t know if it’s because the Ramadan fast has started or just that we’re all lost in thought but on the journey from our office no one says anything. It gives me a chance to look out the window and piece together what is different after a year here. For one thing, the Bagh bazaar is busier – much busier. When I drove through these narrow, crooked streets in January most of the shops were shuttered down and only a few storekeepers were sweeping the road in front of their stalls and bravely opening for business with half-empty shelves. Even then, three months after the disaster, there was still a feeling of loss and shock, of people still reeling. Now in the town you can’t hear for the cars honking, the bustle of the shops, the chatter of streets filled with people. Everywhere you go there are piles of sand, gravel, bricks, and stone. Shops are stuffed to the roof with bags of cement. Brightly decorated tractors, trucks and jeeps are clogging the streets with their reversing and loading and jockeying around as they try to keep up with the huge demand for delivery of building materials.

We drive up out of town and the road lifts up to the crest of ridge so that the houses down the slope are visible. There are still signs of the earthquake: two-storey buildings tilting at angles like crooked teeth, great slabs of cement cracked in half like heaps of broken flatware, the twisted fingers of rebar protruding out of the weeds that have grown over the rubble. The piles of debris are more organized now than they used to be, the salvageable separated from the junk, but spontaneous temporary shelters are still everywhere. As we cross the river and drive higher up the valley, I can see the flashy wink of new tin sheets, hinting that rebuilding has begun.

We turn off the paved road onto a twisting hairpin affair made of broken stones fitted together like a Roman road. As we wind and shudder up towards the village of Surul, it suddenly strikes me just how much we’ve been through this year. The savage snows that everyone was dreading in January did not appear, the winter was mercifully mild, and spring passed almost unnoticed as we carried on with our water scheme planning and the health educators tramped all over these hills, teaching kids to brush their teeth and wash their hands so they wouldn’t get sick. Then came the heat of summer and thirty of us packed into the converted metal shipping containers that were our homes, our offices, our world. The electricity stopped, the generator broke, we ran out of water and burst into profuse sweating at the slightest provocation. After the heat came the rains, pouring down like some dam in heaven had broken and washing the roads and hillsides away, turning roads into rivers and stopping transportation dead. Still we braved going out most days, our drivers with some incalculable combination of genius and luck piloting sliding vehicles around hairpin turns and tiny switchbacks. NGO work is like the theatre: somehow the show goes on.

In the middle of all this, the Kashmir elections and the political jockeying of village candidates, all championing or preventing our work as their strategies devised. The night it was all over, we lay on our backs after dinner and watched the celebration fireworks burst against a starry Bagh sky.

Our truck has to stop before we reach the village because a monsoon landslide a month earlier has washed out a huge section of the road ahead. Sardar and I start up on foot. Bagh is still beautiful country, that hasn’t changed. There is the same smell of jack pines in the air, the same pungent scent of cattle and earth, and surprisingly bright wildflowers popping out of the green grass everywhere. We still pass old, withered men carrying impossible loads or re-building walls stone by stone. School is back in after the summer heat and the girls giggle before and after we pass, flapping in their white and blue uniforms like flocks of birds while the boys shove themselves around and dare each other to run up and shake the foreigner’s hand. The sound of hammers resounds as we approach the village and see the new frames of houses rising beside the piles of rubble that were homes before last October.

Our path goes past the Surul Girls Middle School, and Sardar stops to chat with Saddiq, the school caretaker. I ask if I can ask him about the earthquake, and he agrees. We find a shady spot under a couple of trees, with a view of the mountain sloping steeply up beyond us. Over that ridge and the next one is a place called Saaht Narah, where there is a huge spring source from which we are going to bring water to Surul and two other joining villages. We sit down and I start to ask about how everything is nearly a year later, but before we begin, two women come and join us. Mehbooba is 45, one of the teachers at the school. She looks about 65, but she is energetic and full of things to say. The younger woman is Zehbunisa, and she says she is 30. She is quieter but obviously very sharp, and later I find out she is the school’s headmistress.

I ask them how things are going now, and they all say they are going very well, so I ask them a little about the earthquake. Saddiq is 36 and he has two sons and a daughter. The girl goes to the Surul school and fortunately she was outside when the earthquake came so she wasn’t hurt. Neither were his two sons. Mehbooba and Zehbunisa tell me that two children in their school died when the building collapsed and many others were injured. They now have temporary buildings, but they seem to be holding most of their classes outside. ‘Are the children still afraid?’ I ask them. Mehbooba says that even the wind scares them now, and Zehbunisa adds that when the clouds come over the mountain and the storm rains start, people all go back to their houses.

‘We are all scared, still,’ Mehbooba says. ‘It’s not just the children.’
They tell me that all three of them lost homes in the earthquake, and I ask them about rebuilding. ‘No,’ Mehbooba says, ‘We are in a Red Zone.’ Sardar explains to me that this area is deemed unsafe to build again by the government. Saddiq starts talking animatedly and I catch a few words but not enough to understand.
‘He says that the money from the government for rebuilding has not yet come completely. Maybe in one year,’ Sardar translates.
‘So,’ I say, ‘You say that everything is well now, but the children are scared, you’re still living in temporary shelters, and the government hasn’t given you any money yet?’

Sardar translates and there is a burst of excited talk, punctuated with the word ‘Tearfund’. Mehbooba wins the floor first. ‘We mean we are well because we are happy with Tearfund.’
Saddiq jumps in, ‘Without Tearfund no other NGO has come. They not only gave complete shelter kits but tools as well and this was very useful then because at that time we had no tools.’ Mehbooba goes on to list all of Tearfund’s accomplishments, highlighting the health training and saying that children are healthier now.
‘They brush their teeth,’ she says triumphantly.

I’m never sure about all this praise. Sometimes it seems that it is the cultural norm when foreigners visit. Have we really been that perfect? I have to admit many times when it didn’t feel like that on my end. As if she knows what I’m thinking, Zehbunisa start shooting off piercing questions to Sardar about when the water scheme will be finished and where it will go. When he’s finished his explanations she seems satisfied.

'Are you hopeful for the future?’ I ask in the pause after her questions.
‘We are hopeful especially because of the water,’ she says. ‘Water is the basic thing of life, and if we can get it, life will go on.’
‘The earthquake has been very interesting for us,’ Saddiq adds. ‘Before this, we could only dream of having the water from Saaht Narah, but now, if it comes, it will not be a dream only, but true.'

We exchange a few more pleasantries and even though it’s Ramadan, they offer me tea, but I say we have to move on.

Sardar and I carry on up the steep path above the village to where the trees thin out into grazing pastures. We come across an old man resting in the shade of a single tree in a patch of grass, and pass a woman carrying water on her head up the hill. ‘We are almost 2000 metres above the level of the sea,’ Sardar informs me. We reach the storage tank that is our destination and below us the whole green hillside spreads out and tumbles into the river valley far below, where the water winds away like a ribbon in the sun. It reminds me of hikes I took as a child with my father to places up in the mountains where everything seemed as untouched and fresh and new as the day it was made. It’s hard to believe anything ever happened here. I sit on the nearly-finished water tank and try to think how it feels to be here a year after the earthquake and all that comes are worn clichés about life restored and the resilience of people. The wind picks up gently, carrying hints of winter from the mountains and down below a woman in a red scarf carries water across the pasture. I feel happy, I decide. Happy to have been here, to have walked up and down these mountains, to have chuckled at Sardar’s antics, to have sat and had tea with welcoming strangers under the shade of these trees, and happy to go home in a few months having been witness to whatever meagre re-creation we managed here.

I jump down from the tank wall. ‘Time to move?’ Sardar asks. I nod, and follow him down the hill.