Earthquake survivors wait for life to smile again

A woman who survived the devastation stands in shock outside her tent in the destroyed city of Muzaffarabad. The quake killed 75,000, about half of them children. Picture / Reuters

BALAKOT - She cannot avoid thinking about what happened the day the earthquake struck, but 13-year-old Saadia has a mental routine for starting each school day.

Open the door, turn right, don't look back at the weeds growing on the nearby wasteland where her old school used to be.

Saadia is from Balakot, a town in North West Frontier Province that was more intensively devastated than Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani Kashmir, in the quake that killed 75,000 last October 8.

Her home in the scenic valley among the mountains of northern Pakistan is just a couple of minutes' walk from where her old school once stood.

The four-storey Shahleel Public School collapsed. Saadia was buried under its rubble for four days. Her younger brother died there with 400 other pupils.

The 7.6 quake struck just before 9am on a Saturday, when classrooms were full. It was the same everywhere in the quake zone - it is estimated that nearly half of the dead were children.

For Saadia, memories of the screaming and wailing as she lay trapped beneath a metal pipe are vivid.

Her traumatised elder sister refuses to attend school, but Saadia has been fired by the tragedy.

"If I don't study I have no future. I want to be a doctor and my family supports me in this. That is why I am studying again."

Saadia attends a class still under canvas as the Government has yet to start reconstruction.

"Even sitting here, I'm scared that it will happen again," she says, expressing a fear that is common in the quake zone.

Rebuilding has been slow. The authorities are planning to showcase the opening of a few new schools to mark the anniversary this week, but most will have to wait.

Nadara Hassan Din, 8, is one of the lucky ones. Her school at Chakoti, a Kashmiri village close to the ceasefire line with India, is one of those earmarked for an early opening.

"It is better than the previous building. We're very happy. It has bigger classrooms and open space for playing," Nadara said, before saddening as she remembered two friends who died.

Nadara also has career ambitions, inspired by a teacher who lost her life that day. "I liked my teacher and want to be like her."

Nearly 6300 schools and colleges were damaged or destroyed in the quake, according to the Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority.

Rebuilding started in July, and the authority hopes around 25 per cent will have been completed by the middle of next year. Completing all of them is expected to take three years.

The authority's deputy leader is proud that despite the scale of the catastrophe, schooling carried on.

"There is no child who has missed his educational year. Whether it is in tents or in prefab or permanent building, the schools are functional," said Lieutenant-General Nadeem Ahmed.

Soldiers took the place of dead or injured teachers during the early weeks of the disaster, as the authorities put a priority on restarting classes under canvas to provide children with some sense of normality.

Anwar Qureshi, at the Jinnah Muslim school in Balakot, says the Government has looked after its own schools first and private ones like his are struggling.

He also sees many families, unable to afford any other option, having their livelihoods destroyed by sending their children to schools run by Islamist charities that have been called terrorist organisations by the United States.

"Why blame the parents because they have been economically savaged and prefer to send their children to schools where they don't have to pay fees," he said.

Pakistan is depending on international funding and non-government organisations to sponsor about half the schools, and quake-proof designs have to be approved.

One of the questions most frequently raised in Pakistan in the weeks following the quake was why had so many schools collapsed. Speculation of corruption and incompetence inevitably followed. Now the authorities don't want to take chances.

"We won't allow anybody to violate building codes," said the rehabilitation authority.

The people in Balakot could be in for a long wait. The Government has declared it a "red zone", meaning all new construction is blocked, and there are proposals to shift the town to a location away from the fault line.

For now, the kids go to school carrying Unicef satchels embossed with the message, "Life will smile once again".

- REUTERS