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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 quake. He reports on his experiences in the first entry of his diary.
October 15, 2005
On my first day in Pakistan, I drive into Balakot with a group of Red Cross colleagues. The approach to this town remains a picture postcard; a road that snakes along the river.
But the town itself—which only a week ago was home to over 250,000 people—looks every bit the centre of a massive disaster. There are destroyed homes and shops everywhere, reduced to piles of rubble, stones, dried mud and concrete, some with reinforcing steel rods snaking skywards. Under many buildings there are crushed vehicles, compressed impossibly flat, a fender or a tire alone poking out.
On Balakot’s main street we pass children and adults who have vacant eyes that stare right through us. Others walk about poking through the rubble and some just take in the scene before returning to their villages elsewhere.
Littered along the road are mounds of multi-coloured clothing donated by well-wishers, discarded by the grief-stricken residents of this town almost as soon as they were tossed out of relief trucks.
The international relief presence is the other ubiquitous sight. The United Arab Emirates Red Crescent field hospital—complete with a state-of-the-art intensive care unit, surgical unit, x-ray centre and clinic—sprawls along the river at the entrance to the town. In the next field sits the Spanish Red Cross basic health care clinic.
The nearby army camp’s helipad emanates a continual whir, as helicopter flights constantly shuttle between this base and the hamlets on nearby mountaintops.
There are more medical facilities at the other end of town. Here we jostle with packs of mules loaded with blankets and heading up the mountain to villages where the roads are still closed to vehicle traffic.
Not far from the Malaysian Red Crescent clinic, I spot a 7 year-old girl. I watch as she loosens the bandage and stitches that keep her big toe attached to her foot. Pus and blood ooze from her wound as the threads unravel in her hand.
Her father watches helplessly; both he and his daughter seem to be in shock. He tells me he lost his son and wife in the quake, while his daughter narrowly escaped when a sheet of galvanized zinc roofing fell on her foot.
We persuade him to forcibly take her to the medical team nearby. I wonder how long before she removes the fresh dressing and gangrene will set in.