I've moved

Find me at:
http://transcriptoftheunusual.wordpress.com/

SUNGI

As many of you are aware, I have been in Northern Pakistan for the past couple of months. Whenever/wherever possible I have been actively distributing clothes, money and food to earthquake affectees in NWFP and Kashmir. One of the organizations that I have been in contact with is SUNGI Development Foundation in Abbottabad. They are an organization that strives to help humanity in community development regardless of religion, caste or creed. Especially after the Earthquake, they have started many projects in collaboration with the WFP, UNDP, Red Cross/Red Crescent Society, Oxfam GB, and most recently, Oxfam America.

Soon after the earthquake, SUNGI's primary focus was to distribute food, medicine, clothes, the establishment of tent villages and free medical clinics, etc. in affected areas in NWFP and Kashmir. Now their focus has moved to Rehabilitation efforts. They are currently working towards putting up stronger shelters for homes using CGI sheets, tin, and terpoline.

Some of you asked about how much it would cost to feed a family for one month. I asked Dr. Manzoor Ahmed Awan (Project Manager) and he said that it would be about Pak Rupees 2,000 for an average size family. Other donations that they are hoping for are CGI (corrugated galvanised iron) sheets, terpoline (plastic sheets) and medicines. If you would like to donate anything like this, you may contact me and I will be able to put you in touch with Dr. Manzoor. We are currently working towards gaining a North American representation of SUNGI so that we can facilitate donations from Canada and the US.

I am also currently working with SUNGI's IT ppl towards establishing an online donation form. SUNGI is an extremely well known and well reputable NGO in this area, gaining greater and greater recognition internationally . Their training office is on my street in Abbottabad; as such, I have become well acquainted with many individuals and their work. I encourage all of you to have a look at their website at www.sungi.org.

If anyone would like more information about SUNGI and/or the work they are doing, feel free to contact me. If you can or you have contacts with someone who can provide medicines, terpoline and/or CGI sheets from within Pakistan or from outside, please let me know. If you would like to donate and have a specific target for your donation (eg. for orphans/widows/amputees/sick etc), let me know that as well. Also, if your donation is in the form of zakat, we would need to know that too so that we can direct it properly. Bare in mind that while most people in this area are Muslim, there are people who are not Muslim who have also been severely affected by the earthquake. SUNGI strives to help whoever needs it.

Sorry for not updating in a while...

was busy helping put this website together.. check it out!!

www.deenintensive.com

Muzaffarabad, Kashmir

A few days back we visited Muzaffarabad, Kashmir (near the Epicentre of the Oct 8 Earthquake). Trucks are still gathering the land that slid off of the mountains and clearing streets and roads......

...to be continued

Ballpoint pens for Rs. 15

I was in the bazaar the other day looking for a little marble kitchen contraption for myself when a man selling pens passed by me: "Pen Pandra Rupay Ballpoint, Pen Pandra Rupay Ballpoint, Pen Pandra Rupay Ballpoint" (like a broken record) with only one pen in his hand, about 10 others sticking out of the pocket pen protector that was in his shirt's front pocket and walking through the bazaar like Steve Erkel..oh my god, i haven't laughed that hard in a long time..

What's new?

We just had another 5.2 earthquake this afternoon at around 2pm. I was sitting at the dining table when I heard some startling noises. Thinking it was from upstairs, since that is where the workers are busy fixing up the second storey, I ignored it at first. It has become quiet customary to hear a lot of noises during the day from upstairs because there is a lot of banging, brick throwing, cement stirring, people jumping, etc. but the noise of an earthquake has become quite distinct. From their quietness, I could tell that the workers had become very still. I saw the water in the glasses on the dining table shake and move about. But I was so lazy to bother myself after time and time again of getting up and being alert when an earthquake or jolt passed. So I waited and watched the liquid in the glasses until they stopped moving. "Mom, I think we just had another earthquake." She replied, "Yah? So is that what you do now when you feel an earthquake? You just watch the glasses dance on the table?" What else am I supposed to do - jump, run and holler everytime there is an earthquake? Sigh.

So, today was another earthquake as I've confirmed through the internet article referenced above.

I miss my nice, quiet, still Canada :(

update: there were actually two earthquakes today: Two tremors leave 28 injured in Pakistan

No road, no water, no cattle, no land

‘No road, no water, no cattle, no land'

GRAEME SMITH

From Saturday's Globe and Mail, 25 March, 2006

Suwan, Pakistan — One morning last week, in the grey hours before dawn, Abdul Rahman crawled out of his shelter in the ruined village of Suwan.

A snow leopard's growl made him stop abruptly. He saw the big cat circling around a cattle shed a few metres away, swishing its tail and making a hungry rumbling sound in its throat.

The snow leopard is a rare animal here in the mountains of northern Pakistan, and the villagers tell terrible stories about the white killers with flashing eyes that can leap across great chasms.

Mr. Rahman, 55, said he felt no fear. He had already endured the most dangerous winter of his life, after the Oct. 8 earthquake that turned his home into a pile of stone and mud. He hungered and shivered on this ledge overlooking the Kaghan Valley, refusing to abandon his small farm, and he did not give an inch to the man-sized predator. He screamed like an angry leopard, waved his arms, and the cat disappeared into the mist.

“His den probably collapsed, so he was looking for a home, like everybody else in the valley,” Mr. Rahman said. “I showed him somebody still lives here.”

When a Globe and Mail reporter wandered into Suwan last October in the days after the devastating quake, he was the first outsider to reach the village. Residents, fresh from burying their dead, pondered a grim future as winter loomed. Six months later, the writer returned to the same village to uncover a tale of survival, but came away with lingering questions about what the future holds for Suwan and its residents.

The earthquake destroyed almost every structure, killed 24 of the 700 residents, washed away their stored food, and took most of the livestock. About 65 of the 90 families that lived on this rocky outcrop, two days' drive north of Islamabad, joined the human tide that poured down from the mountains in the weeks after the earthquake.

They encountered a massive aid operation that airlifted more than 30,000 tonnes of food, medicine, tents, blankets, building supplies, and other emergency goods into the stricken area. Relief workers welcomed hundreds of thousands of people into temporary camps, and soon the valleys were littered with tents and tarpaulins. But for people raised in the relative isolation of Suwan, the crowded, fetid camps with their modern influences were an assault.

Now, as spring returns to northern Pakistan, many relief organizations are declaring victory. A mild winter and generous donations helped nearly all the homeless people to survive the winter. The U.S. military will finish its relief operations next week, and Canada pulled its troops out months ago. Pakistan's government has ordered the tent cities closed by March 31, instructing people to go back to their villages, rebuild their homes and start planting this year's crop.

In some places, the reconstruction has already started. The flatlands and foothills glitter as villagers replace their mud roofs with metal sheeting. The Kaghan Valley echoes with the bang of hammers and the scream of electric saws.

But there's a clearly visible line that divides the valley, where the shiny rooftops stop and the mud rubble begins. This is the spot where the road ends, usually buried under landslides or collapsed down a cliff. About 70 per cent of the valley's population lacks road access to return to their villages, and those people aren't enjoying the same springtime optimism felt elsewhere in the disaster zone.

Many have lingered in the relief camps. If evicted, they will probably be forced to set up unofficial camps and shantytowns near major roads.

“How will we survive when we're told to leave the camps?” said Farooq Shah, 57, who has spent the winter sheltered in one of the relief camps. “We have no road, no water, no cattle, no land. Where will we go?”

In theory, villagers from places such as Suwan could hike back to their homes. It's only four kilometres in a straight line from Suwan to the nearest open road. But the terrain is rough, and getting worse; landslides are a daily event. Villagers will need to haul bags of concrete, boards, metal sheeting and other construction materials into the village so they can remake their houses, cattle barns and watermills.

The task is nearly impossible without a road: The path stretches over two mountain ridges, with ledges sometimes only the width of a boot separating a traveller from a chasm hundreds of metres deep. The climb often goes straight up, making it a six-hour trek each way.

After the effort of the trip, villagers who go home might be forgiven for feeling disappointed when they arrive. Nearly all the houses in Suwan are still broken heaps. Stalks of corn, never harvested, are snapped and rotting in the fields. Mouldy sheaves of grass remain bundled on the hillsides where villagers gathered them up as animal fodder and never collected them after their cattle died in the quake. Muddy shoes, clothes and other detritus show how little the villagers carried over the mountains when the majority of them abandoned this place.

Normally, this is the season for plowing the fertile ledges and planting corn. But those terraced fields, hacked into the mountain over centuries, are now cracked, sloped, or washed away. About a quarter of this village's farmland, perhaps 300 acres, has fallen into the valley.

In Suwan, and hundreds of similar villages in this devastated region, one of the few hints of spring are the pink blossoms on the cherry trees.

After the earthquake, it took 22 days for the villagers of Suwan to decide whether to leave for the winter. For some, the earthquake and its profound destruction shook their faith in the whole idea of having a village in such a remote location, at 2,000 metres above sea level. Others interpreted it as a test of their Muslim faith, and vowed to stay and rebuild.

Eventually, one or two at a time, most of Suwan's families made the long walk to safety. Many of them hiked about 30 kilometres south to Balakot, a hard two-day scramble, then caught rides to the city of Mansehra. They stayed with relatives, rented rooms, or joined the overcrowded tent cities. So many of the villagers settled in one neighbourhood on the outskirts of the city that the place became known as “little Suwan.”

None of the villagers found the accommodations comfortable. Sabir Shah, one of the wealthiest landowners in Suwan, could afford only two rooms behind a cattle shed for his 15 family members. Village women normally avoid showing their faces to strangers, even when they're wearing veils, so the idea of the common latrines in the camps made the villagers' eyes widen with horror.

But Mr. Shah couldn't shelter his family from the culture of the city. They had never experienced television, video games, mobile phones, or even electricity that comes from sockets instead of batteries. But since the Shah family took refuge in the city, his three boys, whose ages are 5 to 13 years, have started visiting neighbours' houses to watch cartoons, rock videos, and other cable-television fare.

Life may have been disconcerting in the city, but it was drudgery on the mountain. Those who remained were mostly the strongest men, capable of making the six-hour hike up to eight times a week, ferrying sacks of flour, bags of rice, tins of cooking oil, and heavy canvas tents from the nearby town of Paras to their village.

“It was freezing cold, and incredibly hard, but we were lucky,” said Feroze Shah, 50, one of those who stayed. Food and shelter were scarce, but just enough aid was delivered to keep everybody alive. The villagers were also helped by the slow onset of winter, which gave the villagers time to build shelters for themselves and their cattle.

One day in January, a group of young men realized that the heavens were going to spare their village. They had enough food stocked to relax a little, the weather wasn't so bad, and they celebrated in a typically Pakistani fashion: They played cricket. When snow buried their cricket field, the young men built snowmen, had snowball fights, and dug old X-ray records from medical files so they could sit on the slippery plastic sheets and slide down the mountain.

“The mourning was finished,” said Mohammed Khursheed, 25. “We came back to life.”

Bringing the village itself back to life won't be so easy. Suwan needs somebody to invest about $18,000 to open the road again, and about 30,000 feet of water pipe to tap into a mountain spring. Those requirements might seem modest, but almost every other hamlet dotting northern Pakistan is asking for the same things.

“We have big concerns about the lack of potable water and road access,” said Fazal Mahmood, a reconstruction co-ordinator for the Al-Khidmat Foundation. His organization is sponsored by Jamiat-e-Islami, a leading Islamist opposition group.

“Sending people back to these villages too quickly, without these basics in place, the government is creating a disastrous situation all over again,” Mr. Mahmood said.

Other aid workers are more optimistic. Shakeel Ahmed, regional manager for the Sarhad Rural Support Program, which gets funding from the World Bank, USAID, CIDA, and other Western sources, said many of the villagers have already left the camps and those who remain past the March 31 deadline will probably be collected into two large tent cities.

The more important questions are long-term issues, Mr. Ahmed said, such as the need to encourage villagers to lay sturdy foundations for their buildings so they won't collapse as easily, and, to reduce the threat of landslides, discouraging them from cutting trees.

Mr. Shah says he is confident they will go back and rebuild their homes. He illustrated the reason with two hunting stories. Once, he said, he shot a mountain lion and chased it along a river, following the trail of blood. The cat jumped in the river, leaving the trail cold and allowing it to escape.

On another occasion, just before harvest time, Mr. Shah heard a black bear munching on ripened corn in a field at night. He fired at the noise and heard a loud howl. Again, the animal escaped, although he found it near a stream the next morning.

Mr. Shah wasn't armed when he stumbled across the bear again, but he killed the wounded animal by hurling heavy rocks at its head. When the bear finally collapsed, Mr. Shah says, he noticed medicinal herbs stuck in the wound where his bullet had pierced the night before, as if the bear had been trying to treat its own injury.

“The animals know how to find what they needed in the mountains,” Mr. Shah said. “People do the same thing.”

Sigh.. Another one - 5.5

Last night's earthquake was really scary.

It came at about 10:30pm, when I was already in bed. I was startled from sleep by some cracking noises and then the bed and ground started moving, exactly how I had heard it being described countless times before, as if I were on a boat. The ground was suddenly transformed into a liquid like substance, swaying back and forth for a number of seconds. A number of seconds feels like an eternity when the earth is shaking underneath you. It was a very long earthquake.

As has become customary, after the earthquake stopped, I received mobile text messages from my cousins who live in other parts of the city asking if we felt it and if everything was ok. When it was established that everyone was alright, we began guessing the intensity of the earthquake via SMS. Having experienced almost 2000 earthquakes and aftershocks in a matter of months, most of my cousins can accurately estimate how strong the jolts were. They guessed 5.3 or 5.4. I said it must have been stronger because the one previous to this was only 5.2 and didn't feel as intense or have as lengthy a duration as this one. I couldn't sleep for sometime afterwards because it really did feel like another big one was about to come. Out of fear, I silently said a prayer, quietly cried a little and then, finally, was subsided by sleep.

I woke up by the adhan for Fajr and now just checked the news online (click here for the Indian news story and here for Australian news). Last night's earthquake registered at 5.5 on the Richter scale.

At least I will be returning to Canada shortly, away from these almost-daily scares. I can't help but worry about the people here.. and I am happy that the Canadian government has opened up immigration for those who have been affected by the earhtquake in these areas. If I feel that I need a break from these earthquakes after only a span of a few weeks, people here definitely need a break after almost 6 months.

Donations, Zakat and Sadaqah

I've distributed all the money that I brought with me in the form of Zakat and Sadaqah and have received some emails from others who scolded me for taking this trip before letting them know, as they would have also liked to send donations with me. I apologize for not being able to give many of you advance notice. As I am still here for some more time, if you are interested in donating money please contact my sister to pass it on. Or, if you don't know her, contact me and I will put you in touch with her.

Banks in Ottawa waived the wiring fee to Abbottabad since it falls in the area that has been declared by the government as an Earthquake Affected zone. If the sum of the donations warrant, I'll have Saadia wire the money to me here and distribute it immediately. I will be visiting Muzaffarabad soon, Balakot again, and there are many others in this city who also easily qualify as affected and/or Zakat/Sadaqah deserving.

When I was distributing clothing - jackets, sweaters etc. for adults - some asked me if I had any clothing for children. Unfortunately, I did not. In earlier months, immense amounts of clothing had been sent from all over the country as well as by the international community. Some clothes that were sent were very used and soiled, so these were obviously not of resuable quality. They lay on the side streets untouched and unclaimed. I had been given the impression that all, if not most, clothing lay on side streets unneeded. It's a shame that many fail to realize that just because these people lost so much, they don't deserve clothing that is unripped or unsoiled.

When a few people asked me for chilrens clothing, I deeply regretted not having taken the childrens clothes from my dear friend, CT, when she offered. I had been given mixed messages of whether clothing would be accepted or not. I chanced with one extra suitcase, thinking that if it is not accepted I will distribute it to poor people in the area who were not necessarily as affected by the earthquake.

Children are the biggest victims of these earthquakes. Scores of children perished in schools and many are left battling the elements with inappropriate clothing that their growing bodies quickly stretch out of. I now desparately wish I had brought a separate suitcase full of solely childrens clothing and chanced travelling with two extra pieces of luggage.

Tears well in my eyes when I think about penning what I saw at the tent villages. When we spoke to people in these villages, they looked so shocked and scared, staring with wide open eyes. Their eyes said more than any words could have expressed to describe their horrific earthquake experience, though some couldn't utter many words. When we donated the money saying this is Sadaqah or Zakat, they immediately raised their hands to make dua for the person who thought of them enough to send some help. Sickness, disease, and amputations affect many, from new borns to the aged. They have lost so much and their condition so bad. Our group who travelled to Balakot felt ashamed of having any comfort in life when people are living with these kinds of miseries.

We lead extremely sheltered and spoiled lives in the West. Give me a few days and I will write again. However, I will end with this: When anything negative befalls us, there is, undoubtedly, an opening of hope if we look. The people here know how to look. We don't. we give up easily and quickly. Overtime, we've lost something as well. We may have monetary wealth that we can impart to others easily, but the knowledge of looking for openings of good fortune and hope is lost on our sorry, lazy, ungrateful and unthankful behinds.

Non-stop Earthquakes

We just had another one a couple of hours ago. It felt a lot stronger than the one a few days back. A lot of people screamed and ran out of their houses. It's kinda scary and nerve-racking. I'll probably know its intensity after a few hours.

Scientists have predicted that a major earthquake will befall this region sometime around May 25th this year.

Update:
Moderate earthquake shakes northern Pakistan

I think it happened at the same time as the one in Indonesia:
Moderate earthquake jolts Indonesia's Stunami-devastated aceh