This is the first of two blog entries by Lyndall Stein, writing about her trip to Pakistan one year after the earthquake.
I checked with Hamza on the way out of Islamabad. ‘Do you have a word that is the equivalent of Msungu?' (the African word for any random white person), and he laughed: "Yes! Gora. And that would be Gori if you were a girl". Well, I am an old kinda girl but I guess ‘Gori Girl’ it is. It is a good start - visiting Pakistan: a country so misrepresented, a culture so marginalised, to harvest a word from them, that generalises rather than presents the individual.
This was on the way to Kotli Sattian, a small village just 2 hours from Islamabad, so difficult to reach that it might as well be hundreds of miles away. He explained how the Earthquake had hit whilst everyone was on the Ramadam fast - that was just a year ago. This village, though not as severally affected as those nearer the red zone, had lost houses, its school and water as the movement of the mountain had displaced precious waterpoints.
The whole notion and discipline of a month long fast seemed incongruous to ‘Gori Girl’ as I sat in the meeting room of the Concern office, overlooking the spectacular peaks, the beautiful mountains of the North Western Frontier Province, eating delicious curry prepared by the tall, dignified, and bearded cook who despite fasting himself, cooked and served- me the ‘infidel’, with the greatest solicitude. He laid the table, while the others worked on, leaving me to eat alone. Fouzi, the local project worker who was pregnant, delicately left the room to continue working only after making sure I had everything. She had been assigned by Hamza to look after me, to make sure I would not be lonely whilst he and the other men all went to Friday prayers.
It was a strange dissonance during my trip to Islamabad and then to Mansehra and the Red Zone - the area so devastated by the earthquake, the solicitude with which everyone ensured that we, the Gori and Gora (Pete, Regional director for Asia) were fed and watered despite the fast - bottles of water slipped to us discreetly, take away rice and chicken appearing in the tented office, boxes of nuts for us on the long drives though the terrifying mountain roads that sent blood pressure and adrenaline soaring.
The Concern team, our partners, the villagers of the mountains and valleys, working the animals, the fields, rebuilding the paths and roads, scrambling up the mountains with huge sheets of corrugated zinc- kept the fast. They ate and drank nothing from a meal before dawn at 4.30 till the breaking of the fast, the ritual meal, Iftar, composed of date, fruit somosas and other tasty morsels at sunset.
...Of course greedy ‘Gori Girl’ got to have both! The eating and drinking all day, and then, the breaking the fast with our colleagues, alongside 20 schoolboys, wild with hunger, 50 grown men with growling tummies. Then there was Alia, the young Concern program officer with quiet dignity claiming her place as a fellow colleague, on our table of twenty men, in the crowded restaurant, where amongst a hundred men, other than ‘Gori Girl’ she was the only woman.
We were in the small town of Mansehra, the only undamaged town near the devastated earthquake zone. When the earthquake hit this wildly beautiful part of Pakistan, Mobishar told me how those affected, and those helping kept the fast, even when they were only able to break it with a bit of dry biscuit. In the Sarin valley in the village of Devli , people were completely cut off for 20 days, a few helicopters dropping by over that period, giving them a small amount of supplies.
When we arrived these extraordinary, strong, and resilient people were scrambling over the hillsides carrying 7ft sheets of zinc sheeting to rebuild their homes and animal shelters. The distribution was taking place under the watchful eye of one of the local people - surprisingly a tall red head- we had seen another tall striking redhead working with the team rebuilding the road both projects supported by Concern and our partners Haashar, who had been the first group to enter the valley after the earthquake. The work of reconstruction has been organised to enable the villagers to earn money. The redhead told us that 3 percent of the villagers had red hair, and pale eyes, a quirk of genetics, a reminder of a long ago migration from across the Russian Steppes perhaps. He looked like my cousin Stanley, the same red hair and high cheekbones the same heritage from the high mountains of the Urals.
All over the valley and the mountains the zinc sheets gleamed, in this area thankfully, there were no tents, but the struggle to build permanent homes is hampered by many difficulties, access to materials, the faulty administration of government grants to families, the demanding nature of the new building requirements, which rightly, want to ensure that in future earthquakes or cyclones, it will not only be the homes of the rich which will survive.
Picture by Shaidul Alam/Concern worldwide.
