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Dear Friends,
I recently returned from Balakot, Mansehra, Muzzafarabad and Bagh and
wanted to send you my observations from the area...I didn't write a
diary this time around...Just some general notes about life in the
winter and the conditions there...

All the best
Sharmeen
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Dispatch 1: From my travels between January 12th-17th 2006

Balakot/Mansehra:
It's been raining here for several days now...Rain, hail, lightening
and thunder and the only thing separating nature from me is a big
white tent laden with plastic sheets (to prevent water from seeping
through).

Imagine surviving the October 8 earthquake and then having to live
through these treacherous conditions every day in a roadside tent.
This is real life trauma that the earthquake refugees have to face on
a daily basis.

Nasreen Bibi, lost her young husband and her two children in the Oct
8th tragedy. She lost her home, her belongings and her job. Her new
home is in a small tent community in Ghari Habibullah. "What will
become of me," she questions? Her three young children scream out in
pain when the sky thunders, when the rain comes pouring through their
tent. "The rain and hail reminds them of the earthquake," she tells
me. "It reminds them of their home, their dead father and sisters. We
just want to get away from all of this, but where can we go?"

That is a question I grappled with throughout my visit to the
region...Will the scars of the earthquake ever heal? Do these people
have the strength to survive the next two months in these conditions?
Nasreen has no money, she has no one to turn to, how will women like
her feed their children when the aid dies down, when the world
community moves to another natural tragedy somewhere else in the
world...what hope does Nasreen have for the future?

As you drive from Islamabad to Balakot, every four wheel jeep and
every truck on the road bears the banner of an international NGO.
From the Japanese to the Swiss every NGO is in the region. In fact, I
have never seen so many charities working in Pakistan. I met
volunteers from the U.S. from France, Germany, Turkey, Malaysia, the
U.K. and Indonesia...They have all come to the area to help
out...They hand out food, kerosene, water...The world community is
responding to the immediate needs of these people with impressive
speed, but then what? A volunteer from M?decins Sans Fronti?res (MSF)
wondered out loud to me at a kerosene distribution point, "This is a
huge disaster, we are doing all we can, but we don't see any
rebuilding going on, and we wonder when that will start."

The same question lingers on the minds of the residents of Balakot as
I found out when I spoke to them in the makeshift vegetable market.

Zaheer Khan's village is an hour's hike from Balakot. He was buying
vegetables for his wife, when I walked up to him. After some pleasant
banter he got right to the point. "We don't have any building
supplies, no wood, not enough tin sheets or tools to rebuild our
house." As he spoke, a seventy year old man named Karimullah stopped
by to say, "Nobody rebuilds for the poor, we will never have our
homes back, we will live like refugees for years to come."

The desperate conditions in the refugee camps have angered many
people in the area; Some of who feel trapped in their new tent
communities. As I left the market, a young man named Sami Zahoor
pulled me aside. He had come from Peshawar to help build tin houses
in Balakot. "There is one institution that is working hard," he told
me. "The Pakistan army, without them this area would be in complete
chaos. They have kept everyone in check, they have bought law and
order to the region. They clear away the roads when the mud slides
happen, and when Pakistani citizens like myself offer our help to
rebuild, they assist us. There is already some rebuilding taking
place, but you cant suddenly find housing for 3 million people, it
will take time..."

This was not the first time I heard this, throughout my trip, I heard
young men crediting the army for the work they have done in the
region...

But there was also another group that got very high marks from the
residents of Balakot...The Islamic relief group, Jamaat ud-Dawa. The
Jamaat has strong links to the banned Kashmiri jihadi organization
Lashkar-e-Tayyiba. I made my way to Mansehra to visit a camp run by
them.

From the outside the camp looks like any other refugee unit, except
for the shining advertisement boards outside the entrance which
reads "Complete Islamic Veiling for Women," Camp run along Islamic
lines, separate schools for girls and boys."

Once you walk in you realize that these people mean business. They
have a state of the art operation theater, medical facilities, they
have set up computers in tent classes, they have massive electricity
generators, a play area for children, a four storey storage facility
filled to the brim with warm clothes, bedding and food stock. If
nothing else, these people are extremely well funded and have
dedicated volunteers who have spent months on end working in the camp.

The atmosphere in this camp is very different. Men with long hair and
long beards walk around, making sure that men and women are not
seated together and that women are properly veiled. They prohibit
photography and anything "un-Islamic" such as
television. "Photographs are not allowed in Islam," they tell me.

Abu Zargam who runs one of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa camps was very
forthright when I met him at the camp. He told me that the Jamaat
had nothing to do with the armed Lashkar-e-Tayibba (militant outfit)
yet he couldn't explain to me why so many of the young men in the
camp, hid their faces every time a camera was pointed at them and why
one of them told my colleague that Jihad was an important pillar of
Islam. (Totally false for those people unfamiliar with Islam) Abu
Zargam spoke about the need to create a society run on the lines of
Islam..."Our refugee camp is a microcosm of what Pakistani society
should be like," he said. "Segregation, no entertainment like cinema,
no billboards of half naked women. And this is how its going to be
once the relief operation is over. We are teaching these people to
pray, to seek forgiveness from God, to run their lives according to
Islam."

It is no doubt that they are providing excellent services to the
refugees, further down the road at another camp, children don't even
have access to a school, here they are learning Microsoft on Pentium
5 computers. Something to wonder about...

Kasim Sohail who came to the camp from Kaghan told me that he liked
the environment. "Look we like segregation, so we are happy with the
services here. They are teaching us about Islam, it is an opportunity
for my young son to learn about the religion. I don't want him to
make the same mistakes I did, or my generation did..." The question
here is what kind of an Islam are these people being taught? Is Islam
only about complete segregation? Is it not also about forgiveness,
about love and compassion?
What kind of an Islam will Karim's son grow up with?

Just outside the Jamaat camp, a young woman approaches my car and
begs me to listen to her. "These people are not interested in relief
work. I am a widow with two young daughters. These people only help
those who agree with their Islam. I don't veil completely and neither
do my daughters so they refused to help us. In fact one of the men in
the camp told me to cover up or never show my face here again. My
head is covered, I'm wearing the traditional clothes, what more do
they want?"

These are the politics of their relief work...Everything in life
comes at a cost, and the cost of allowing these kinds of groups to
actively operate in the area will come to surface slowly....Their
impact will be ever lasting...

As the rain continues to pelt down, cases of pneumonia are on the
rise. In every camp I visited, I saw young children succumbing to the
respiratory disease. Most people in the Balakot/Mansehra area are
drinking contaminated water from the river, so kidney problems are on
the rise. There is no sanitation, no waste disposal and everyone is
exposed to these conditions on a daily basis. Children are playing in
such conditions, women are cooking and washing clothes in these
conditions and it's taking a toll on their lives.

As you drive down from Balakot to Islamabad, it really hits you?
Balakot looks like a war-torn, refugee zone, where life has come to a
complete halt after the earthquake?Where people are still clinging to
worn out photographs of loved ones lost in the rubble?

Islamabad is buzzing?school children piled up in vans head to school,
cars whiz by, shops are crammed with buyers and one hopes that as the
months go by Balakot, once the tourist destination of choice stands
up tall, embraces the winter and fights back to rebuild?


Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy sharmeenobaidfilms.com