Backpacks not Bombs
International aid brings more than relief to earthquake victims, humanitarian challenge remains
Akil Oran, left, with two classmates inside
the Ayubia school. Photo by Alex Stonehill.
Ayubia, PAKISTAN—Ten year old Fazia Reza was in English class when she felt the ground starting to move. She watched in terror as the walls of the school began to tremble and crack, obeying her teacher’s shouts to run outside and start praying just in time to see the roof collapse and the walls cave in. Her father, one of 40 people injured in this tiny village of just 145 families, lost his leg, and two others died in the October 8, 2005 earthquake. Almost all of the town’s buildings were destroyed.
"When we went home we spent the whole night under the sky, even though it was raining and we didn’t have a roof over us. Everyone was saying another earthquake was coming," explains Reza, who still relies on friends to help carry her backpack to school after being hit by falling debris from the school building.
Eight months later, most people here are still sleeping barely sheltered from the sky, either because funds to rebuild their homes have not been available, or because the experience has left them so traumatized that they have chosen tents even in unforgiving winter weather over proper structures that they fear will collapse again. Regular aftershocks do little to assuage their fears of another serious quake.
Media coverage – and the private aid it inspired – was generous immediately following the earthquake. Government and private aid from the US alone totaled over US$300 million, even given predicted "disaster fatigue" in the wake of the tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. But Ayubia, in the foothills of the Himalayas in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, still looks much like the images that washed over American television screens eight months ago.
The bare cement foundation of the former school building now serves as a central gathering place for the village. The rubble from the walls and roof has been swept into piles which line the foundations of canvas tents that were erected two months ago to house classrooms for 130 students. School has been back in session since January, but the facility is far from what it was before the disaster, reflecting the widespread belief among the aid community that rebuilding will be a much bigger challenge than relief.
"We don’t have any water in the school now. We need desks for the students, and more chairs and blackboards. We need at least two more teachers – I am teaching all the students myself," says Masudur Rehman, who has been teaching in the village since 1975, "but what we really need is a new school building. This structure won’t last through the winter. Even now we have to rebuild it every time there is a storm."
Despite all that is still needed local NGOs say that international aid has inspired a challenge to deep-rooted anti-Western ideas. The communities hardest hit by the earthquake have long experienced a lack of development support from their government and the West, and have been harshly depicted in the media as fundamentalists and terrorists.
Headmaster Masudur Rehman.
Photo by Alex Stonehill.
But as Tanya Khan, Social Sector Specialist for Rural Programs Support Network (RSPN), explains, "through the earthquake response they’ve seen the soft side of the West. A few years ago anything that advertised an American presence here would have been enough to incite violence," continues Khan, referring to the plastic USAID backpacks printed in Urdu with ‘A gift from the American people.’ "But now they’re all over the place."
Both domestic and international aid organizations faced difficulties in implementing successful relief and rebuilding programs. "In Pakistan, no one was trained to manage a disaster on this scale," says Khan, who adds that at first international organizations faced problems as well. "None of the international organizations had the capacity to reach out to these communities. We had access because we’ve been here all along, trying to bring safe water and quality education to areas that have otherwise been basically forgotten."
The earthquake exposed longstanding inadequacies in the Pakistani government’s ability to provide basic services to its people. "The fact that government buildings, especially schools, were the most likely to collapse in the earthquake is evidence of the corruption in building contracts that went into their construction," says Tashfeen Kahn, an RSPN staff member who has been working here since before the disaster. He explained how the NGO sector’s role in filling gaps left by the government has strengthened relationships with the quake-affected communities, "Before the earthquake these communities used to think NGOs were only here to exploit them. Now they understand that they’re here to help."
But last year’s outpouring of relief has dwindled. Over the next four years, USAID will be offering only $200 million to aid reconstruction. A sign posted in the RSPN office reminds its workers of the limits of the help they can offer, with admonishments to "never over commit," and "never give false hope." Many of the 3 million displaced people have returned to their villages, only to face isolation from medical and food relief and continued psychological distress. What has been gained diplomatically may be lost if stronger international aid doesn’t emerge before the coming winter.
Akil Oran, 11, whose mother died in the earthquake, asked to speak to the American people directly: "We want to thank you for sending money for the school and the chairs and the backpacks. But we still need more classrooms, benches, furniture, and some swings. I’m asking because I’ve heard that Americans are very good. They helped us a lot when the earthquake came."
© 2007 The Common Language Project
