Note: The following appeal is now closed. You can support our ongoing work by donating to the Canadian Red Cross
By Shehryar Sarwar
Mr. Sarwar is a Canadian Red Cross relief worker based in Pakistan’s earthquake zone. He is working as part of the massive emergency operations supplying urgently needed aid to survivors of the October 8 earthquake. He reports on his experiences in the second entry of his diary.
October 19, 2005
Today we are elated to have distributed tents, blankets and tarpaulins to 500 families in Batang. Transporting these relief goods has been a triumph of logistics and planning, and a victory over punishing terrain and poor road conditions.
The relief goods were brought in by truck convoy from Islamabad to our base camp at Batrasi. The supplies were then transferred to a convoy of tractor trolleys that slowly made its way to Gari Habibullah.
At Gari Habibullah, the goods were loaded into battered jeeps that each transported seven tents and 10 sacks of blankets and tarpaulins up the narrow mountain road.
In the jeep I was travelling in, the weight was evened out by four brave Boy Scout volunteers who perched on top and two men who clung on to the front fenders. It was a harrowing journey—on our right the mountain and to our left a precipice with a 1,000 metre drop.
We careened to the top of the mountain and arrived in Batang where our distribution point was located in a wheat field not yet sown for the next season. More Boy Scout volunteers were at the distribution point to help.
Some 500 men were waiting silently and patiently for the relief supply distribution. They clasped crumpled bits of paper, their assessment slips entitling them to a tent, a tarpaulin and seven blankets for their families.
Once five jeeps from the convoy had arrived with supplies, a volunteer started calling out names on the distribution list.
One by one each man came forward and stood poised as an 60 kg tent, blankets and a tarpaulin were loaded onto his shoulders.
An aid recipient I met at the Red Cross distribution was Ghulam Mustafa—whose daughter-in-law and her son were buried in the rubble of their home.
Mustafa shuffled away, bent double with the weight he would carry to his village two kilometres away. He still managed to smile—knowing that finally his surviving family will regain the protection and privacy they value so highly.