The
winding mountain road from Balakot to Old Sanghar village is
still scarred by landslides, nearly ten months after the earthquake
that devastated northern Pakistan in October last year. Boulders
the size of buses hover above the road, halfway down their headlong
plummet, waiting for the next monsoon downpour or aftershock
to shake them loose.
Looking up at the ridgelines three or four thousand metres high
in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, it is hard
to imagine the raw power of a tremor capable of moving mountains.
“I was planting garlic in the field with my two children
when the earth shook,” says Saeeda Bibi. “I looked
back and saw my house had collapsed. My husband was inside.
I thought to myself, ‘Everything is finished’.”
Saeeda has lived in Old Sanghar village all her life. Now aged
25, she is married with two children. In September 2005, three
weeks before the earthquake, she was one of seven women and
18 men who attended a Pakistan Red Crescent Society (PRCS) training
session in community based disaster preparedness. For four days,
Saeeda and her fellow participants learned about different types
of disaster, how to prepare before the event, how to react afterwards
and where to go for help.
“There was an earthquake here in Balakot in 2004,”
says Mufti Mansoor, the disaster management officer for the
North West Frontier Province branch of the PRCS. “A thousand
houses were damaged then. Floods and landslides are even more
common. So it was clear to us that this is a disaster-prone
district.”
By early 2005, Mansoor had already laid plans to establish a
disaster management cell and warehouse nearby, as well as to
conduct preparedness training in eight districts deemed to be
at-risk across the province.
Mufti encountered considerable opposition in recruiting women,
as well as men, into his training programme. The mountain regions
of the North West Frontier are deeply conservative.
“Before my training, people of the area criticised me
for going to the town, alone as a woman, for training,”
says Saeeda. “They called my husband and told him to stop
me but he said I could go.”
At the time, neither Saeeda nor her husband could possibly know
that just a few weeks later, her newly-acquired skills would
help save their loved ones’ and neighbours’ lives.
When the 8 October earthquake struck, Saeeda immediately found
somewhere safe for her children. Then she saw her husband emerge
unscathed from the ruins of their home as dazed survivors began
gathering on a nearby terraced field. The mountainside to which
Old Sanghar clings is so sheer that the terraces are no more
than two or three metres wide.
“I heard that my uncle, his wife Naseema Bibi and eight
month old child were trapped under the ruins of their collapsed
home,” says Saeeda. “We used farming tools and our
bare hands to dig them out. Aftershocks kept shaking the ground.
After five hours, we rescued them… they all survived.”
Not everyone in the village shared Naseema’s luck. On
top of the hill lies the ruined rubble of the village school.
Pages of discarded exercise books still flap in the wind. A
wooden class chair is buried to the arms by severed chunks of
reinforced concrete. Of the 11 people who died when the earthquake
struck Old Sanghar, 10 were school children, aged between 5
and 15 years, their lives extinguished in seconds.
How did Saeeda react in the face of disaster – did her
Red Crescent training help? “After the earthquake in 2004,
we didn’t know what to do,” she says. “But
with the training, I realised I had to rescue people, mobilise
people… so I left my home and organized others to help.”
She provided water for survivors, and cleaned mud from the bodies
of victims. She told villagers to get blankets and assist the
injured. She helped rescue some schoolchildren and pulled out
dead bodies. Together, Saeeda and those with her saved more
than 40 people from their collapsed homes.
“We also learned the need for psychological support from
our training,” she adds, “So I asked people not
to cry. I told them the disaster was not our fault.”
For around 10 days, no aid arrived in Old Sanghar village. While
the PRCS and the Federation were responding as best they could,
communication with remote hamlets such as Sanghar was completely
cut off.
With temperatures below freezing, the villagers were sleeping
rough in the fields – too scared to venture back inside
their homes as dozens of aftershocks shook the region. Eventually
Saeeda decided to go in search of aid herself.
“I knew I had to communicate to other people what had
happened,” she says. She set off on foot to raise the
alarm. Once more, the whole village objected to her going to
a strange town on her own. Undeterred, she trekked for five
hours across landslides and past ruined houses, until she reached
the Red Crescent office in Balakot.
Thanks to the vital information she provided, the PRCS responded
by sending tarpaulin sheets, tents, blankets, kitchen sets and
stoves back to her village.
Saeeda Bibi is clearly an exceptional woman. With the knowledge
gained from PRCS training just weeks before the earthquake,
her ability and drive were harnessed into action. The PRCS is
committed to ongoing disaster preparedness training in order
to mobilise the most effective resource there is when tragedy
strikes – communities
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Saeeda
Bibi is a 25-year-old wife and mother of two. Thanks to
disaster preparedness training she received from the Pakistan
Red Crescent, Saeeda helped save the lives of 40 of her
fellow villagers following the October 2005 Pakistan earthquake.
(photo by Jonathan Walter) (p14383)
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The
most effective and immediate form of disaster response
often comes from communities themselves.(photo by John
Tulloch) (p14384)
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