Stones Into School (14 page)

By working the phones through most of that night and a good portion of the following day, I was able to confirm that all members of our operation and their families were safe and that all of our schools in Pakistan were still standing. There had been no deaths, not even any injuries, and only a minor crack in the lower wall of the Al Abid Primary School in Skardu. By that time, however, it had also become clear that the damage inside Kashmir was catastrophic.

Reports indicated that numerous towns and villages throughout northern Pakistan were completely wiped out. On each street and in every neighborhood, there were extended families in which every member of the clan--dozens of men, women, and children--had been killed instantly and interred together beneath the rubble of their homes. In the capital city of Muzaffarabad, the main hospital was demolished, killing more than two hundred patients. The city's prison had also pancaked, burying fifteen prisoners and wounding forty others while sixty survivors ran to safety. (One of the only structures left standing was a special set of gallows in the courtyard that could accommodate three condemned criminals at the same time.) Somewhere amid the wreckage of Muzaffarabad University, hundreds of college students had been buried alive. Families wandered the streets, refusing to return to their homes. Children, women, and men sat or stood in the open and wailed. By nightfall, dogs roamed the streets, tearing at the bodies of the dead until patrolling soldiers shot them down.

During the previous half century, Pakistan had suffered through four wars, two military coups, and any number of floods, bombings, political assassinations, and other disruptions, but there had never been anything quite like this. The trembler registered a magnitude of 7.6, approximately the same as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Satellite photos would later reveal that the quake had triggered 2,252 landslides, according to two American seismologists. Within a ten-mile radius of the town of Patika, there wasn't a single hospital bed, working telephone, or drop of municipal drinking water. The death toll according to the U.S. Geological Survey would eventually exceed eighty-six thousand, qualifying it as the worst natural disaster in the history of Pakistan, and the twelfth most destructive earthquake of all time.

A quarter of those casualties--nearly eighteen thousand dead--were children, most of them students who were in school when the earthquake struck. Strangely, the vast majority of those dead schoolchildren were girls, and as the debris was cleared away and the bodies were recovered, the explanation for this imbalance slowly emerged. While the boys had tended to race to safety by bolting out the windows and doors, most of the girls had instinctively huddled together and perished. Also, thanks to the government's tendency to channel the best resources toward male students before seeing to the needs of the females, many of the girls did not have desks--which might have saved thousands of lives had the girls been able to crawl under them for safety.

According to Pakistan's Ministry of Education, 3,794 schools and colleges in Kashmir and 2,159 in the Northwest Frontier Province had been destroyed. Roughly half a million students had been cut off from their studies. The education infrastructure for the region--offices, records, payrolls, everything--was gone, and more than five hundred teachers were dead. In less than four minutes, an entire generation of literate children had been wiped out.

It would take months before the extent of the destruction had been fully cataloged and analyzed. For the moment, the only thing the people of northern Pakistan really had was a name for what had befallen them.

In Urdu, the word for earthquake is zalzala. But throughout Kashmir, then and to this day, the event that took place on the morning of October 8 was simply known as the Qayamat--“the apocalypse.”

Shaukat Ali spent all of Sunday, October 9, clawing at the rubble in search of injured girls, three of whom were pulled out alive. By now his hands were torn and his clothing was covered in blood. That night, the cries of girls who were trapped inside, which had been growing fainter, finally died out, leaving only silence. Just before noon on Monday, however, Shaukat Ali heard whimpers coming from the section of the wreckage where the fourth-grade classroom had been located. He and a group of men clawed feverishly at a hole in the rubble, dislodging a rain of stones and dirt.

“You idiot bastards, stop throwing rocks at us!” came a voice from within. “Can't you see that we are helpless and stuck?”

“This is your master Shaukat Ali,” shouted Chaudry. “Are you okay?”

“We need water,” came the response, “and we don't like you throwing stones at us when we have done nothing wrong!”.

An hour later, a dozen men had cleared away several stones weighing more than two hundred pounds and a maze of twisted rebar to expose a pair of fourth graders named Aanam and Anii. They were surrounded by a close circle of fifteen of their dead friends, whose bodies had protected them from falling debris and cushioned the worst of the impact. Although Aanam and Anii could not see each other in the darkness and the dust, they had been holding hands for seventy-five hours.

After the girls were safely extracted, each guzzled a bottle of mineral water, then ran straight home. Later that evening, Shaukat Ali decided it was finally time for him to do the same.

When he reached the village of Batangi, he found his mother, Sahera Begum, huddled shivering in the rain under a sheet of plastic next to the ruins of their house. Nothing was left, not even her shoes or the family Koran. From his mother he learned that one of his sisters had been killed and already buried, along with his brother-in-law and all of his closest childhood friends. Of the 165 houses in his community, only 2 had been partially spared.

The following day, Shaukat Ali walked back into the center of Patika to purchase a shovel, a pick, some kerosene, and a pair of shoes for his mother. Then he returned home and started to dig out her belongings. With the help of his brothers and sisters, he spent that day and the next excavating the remains of her household and rigging a temporary shelter. Then on the seventh day, he walked twelve miles into the city of Muzaffarabad and was amazed by what he found.

Amid the wreckage and the chaos was a completely new town: a chaotic bazaar filled with supplies flown in from the world outside, new neighborhoods fashioned from tents and plastic, and most striking of all, new faces. The Red Cross, the Pakistani army, and the American army were all there, along with a host of international relief organizations, and the media. They were handing out free clothing and food, which Shaukat Ali could not bring himself to accept. He also refused to accept a job: The Red Cross desperately needed to hire translators, and people with his skills were in high demand. They were offering one hundred dollars a day in pay, more than he could make in a month. Instead, he went back to Patika and met with Saida Shabir, the principal of the Gundi Piran Girls' School.

A diminutive figure with dark eyes, thick glasses, and a limp, Shabir was nevertheless a formidable woman. She had been an educator for nearly thirty years, rising from teacher to administrator on the basis of a ferocious work ethic, and when she opened her mouth to express her displeasure, even the men stopped talking. She was known--and feared--for her fierce temper, her ability to make things happen fast, and a willingness to dress down any student, teacher, or government official who failed to conform to the standards she had set.

Shabir and Shaukat Ali agreed that although rebuilding the region's educational infrastructure hardly qualified as a top priority in the minds of the military and government officials who were spearheading the relief efforts, schools--especially girls' schools--were a potent symbol of progress. Getting classes up and running as quickly as possible could offer a beacon of hope for the entire community.

“Shaukat,” ordered the headmistress, “go back down to Muzaffarabad, speak to the army commander who is in charge, and find out what sort of assistance he can offer.”

Upon returning to Muzaffarabad, he approached a Pakistani army colonel who had been tasked with distributing relief supplies and explained that he needed several canvas tents so that he and Shabir could reopen their girls' school and resume classes. When the colonel realized that Shaukat Ali was serious, he called him a fool.

“Yes, that may be the case,” replied Shaukat Ali. “But if the Pakistani army refuses to provide shelter, then we will have to begin teaching in the open air--and as you know, winter is just around the corner.”

When he left Muzaffarabad, he had four eight-by-twelve-foot canvas tents--enough to accommodate six hundred students.

Back in Patika, he and Shabir agreed that time was short. All across Pakistan, government-administered schools would conduct final exams the following March, and if the girls of the Gundi Piran school were to have any chance of passing those tests, classes needed to resume as quickly as possible. Word was sent out that the school would reopen on November 1.

That afternoon, October 13, the rain finally stopped and it started to snow.

In the meantime, having returned home to Bozeman, I was anxious to survey the damage and talk with people on the ground. I realized, however, that it was probably more important for me to stay in the States for now. Our supporters and donors, old and new alike, would be sending in checks and wanting to know how we were going to spend the money. The mountaineering and the outdoor communities would surely want to donate tents, sleeping bags, parkas--and many of these people would be looking to us for guidance on how to get those supplies to Pakistan. All of which put me in a rather awkward and uncomfortable position.

Providing aid in the midst of a natural disaster is an extraordinarily complex and expensive job that presents almost impossible difficulties, even for organizations that specialize in this kind of work. The infrastructure for delivering food, providing shelter, and ensuring sanitation--not only for the victims but also for the relief workers--often has to be created from scratch and set up on the fly. Restoring power, transportation, communication, and proper medical care requires professionals with enormous expertise. In the face of such challenges, the notion that a group as tiny as the Central Asia Institute--an NGO that by then had built fewer than fifty schools on a budget of less than a million dollars a year--might somehow reinvent itself overnight as an emergency relief provider was well meaning but supremely impractical. We were not set up for emergency work, we knew almost nothing about the business of disaster relief, and with our new initiative in Afghanistan, our limited manpower and financial resources had already been stretched to the breaking point.

On the other hand, given what had just happened, a large chunk of northeastern Pakistan had just been cut off from the rest of the world and left to fend for itself. Whether we liked it or not, the residents of this region were now, quite literally, the people at the end of the road.

On October 10, Sarfraz finally called. He was already in the earthquake zone.

Sarfraz had felt the vibrations at his home in Zuudkhan, instantly grasped the significance of what had taken place, and hit the road. It had taken more than forty-eight hours for him to make his way to Islamabad and then head east, hitching rides in trucks, minivans, and jeeps and hiking over the sections that had been buried by landslides.

As soon as I heard his voice, I started grilling him about what was happening, but he told me to hold off with the questions. It would be several days, he explained, before he would be able to reach the most remote sections of the disaster area. Once there, he would take stock of the situation and report his findings back to me. Then we could decide together how the Central Asia Institute might be able to help. If we had a role to play, he suggested, it would depend heavily on what had happened to the local schools. For the moment, what we needed most was information.

His first destination was Balakot, a town on the eastern edge of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province. The scene that greeted him there was shocking. In some places, the road was lined with bodies waiting for relatives or friends to identify them for burial. In other places burials were already taking place, but thanks to a shortage of picks and shovels, people were digging graves with wooden boards or their bare hands. In one particular spot, he came upon a woman sitting by the debris from a collapsed school that her two daughters had attended. The rubble had already been pushed aside with a bulldozer, and the area had been combed by cadaver-sniffing dogs, who had failed to turn up any sign of her daughters, but the grieving mother refused to believe that her children's bodies were not inside. Sarfraz tried to console her, but she was refusing to eat, drink, or sleep.

From Balakot he continued working his way north up the Kaghan Valley, which is heavily populated by ethnic Pathans, a notoriously insular community. Many of these people seemed to react negatively to the idea that intruders from the outside were there to help. “Why are you coming here?” several locals demanded of Sarfraz. “We have no food or shelter for even ourselves--go away!”

Eventually Sarfraz managed to befriend an elderly Pathan named Mohammed Raza, who advised him that it would probably be best if he left the area for now. The residents would eventually begin turning their attention to the business of rebuilding schools, counseled Raza, but now was not the proper time. Should Sarfraz return in a year or two, he would probably meet with a better reception.

Based on the response he had received in the Kaghan, Sarfraz's conclusion was pessimistic. If people didn't exactly welcome him, a fellow Pakistani, how would they respond to the arrival of an American working for a foreign NGO like the Central Asia Institute? After returning to Islamabad and sharing his negative prognosis with me, he posed a difficult question.

If the Kaghan Valley would not work out, was it appropriate for us to start exploring the more remote areas that lay directly along the border between India and Pakistan--the places where outsiders had not ventured in years? In other words, should we consider venturing into the heart of Pakistan-administered Kashmir?