NEWS FROM
LUTHERAN WORLD RELIEF
November 29, 2005
For more information contact Emily Sollie at esollie@lwr.org or 410-230-2802.
In this news release:
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Earthquake Provides Lessons For Aid Agency As Relief Workers Race Against Winter: An Update From Action By Churches Together And Lutheran World Relief
EARTHQUAKE PROVIDES LESSONS FOR AID AGENCY AS RELIEF WORKERS RACE AGAINST WINTER: AN UPDATE FROM ACTION BY CHURCHES TOGETHER AND LUTHERAN WORLD RELIEF
Mansehra, Pakistan, November 29, 2005 — Sher Shaider’s six-year-old son was feeling sick the morning of October 8, so the school teacher decided to take him to a clinic rather than go to work. It saved Shaider’s life, and gave him a chance to work saving other lives in his village of Thakot.
Shaider is one of more than 1,500 school teachers in northern Pakistan who have been trained in disaster preparedness and mitigation during the last two years. The training was sponsored by Church World Service (CWS)-a member of Action by Churches Together (ACT), the international alliance of churches and church-based agencies responding to emergencies. Lutheran World Relief is a member of ACT and is responding to the earthquake through partners in the ACT alliance.
The most recent teacher training took place October 2 in Balakot, where some 100 teachers, meeting in separate training sessions for women and men, were coached in preparedness for emergencies, including training their students to crouch beside their desks, how to evacuate the building to a safe location, and how to treat the wounded. CWS provided first aid kits and stretchers for each location.
And then, less than one week later, the big one struck. In most places the preparation had little impact, however, as the brisk shaking of the ground quickly knocked everyone to the floor, and heavy concrete roofs collapsed onto classroom after classroom full of children. Some estimates claim that as many as 10,000 classrooms collapsed in northern Pakistan. Most of the teachers that CWS had trained in disaster preparedness were killed, along with thousands of their students.
“There was no way out for them. No training could have helped them cope with this kind of disaster,” said Dennis Joseph, the associate director of operations for CWS.
According to Saima Abbasi, a CWS field officer in the relief effort and one of the trainers at the October 2 session, a few teachers did survive, yet with relief work the priority she hasn’t had time to search for them. A few teachers are reportedly hospitalized in nearby Abbottabad, but Abbasi has been so busy helping homeless families prepare for the looming winter that she hasn’t had time to visit them. She wants to hear how their training might have made a difference, but she admits that in most cases, it probably did not. “They had no time to respond,” she said. “And now they’re dead, many still buried under the rubble.”
Although he wasn’t in his classroom, Shaider said he put his training to work by helping provide first aid to several families, evacuating damaged structures, and organizing a team to save farm animals trapped in a collapsed shed. Now he has taken a leading role in organizing survivors to prepare for the harsh winter ahead. “We’ve been devastated by the earthquake, but there is still a lot we can do to survive and begin to rebuild,” he said.
Preparedness is the Solution
Throughout Pakistan, people face the challenges of a variety of recurrent disasters, but the country’s mountainous north, according to CWS Director Marvin Pervez, is Pakistan’s only multi-hazard area, subject to mudslides, flash floods, earthquakes, and more. “You name it, you get it in the north,” Pervez said.
That’s why the CWS disaster preparedness and mitigation program, launched in 2002, had focused much of its attention on the north. Since 1981 CWS had a health program operating among Afghan refugees in the area, so it already had staff on the ground and good relationships with local leaders. It was a natural place to crank up the disaster preparedness program, using teachers as a port of entry into remote communities that are often very conservative and reluctant to trust outsiders. The program also sought to improve the capacity of local non-governmental organizations whose close relationships with village members put them in a unique position to strengthen the resilience of local communities by fostering a culture of preparedness.
It was slow, patient work. The earthquake cut it short. Yet CWS officials maintain they’re on the right track.
“We firmly believe that response is not the solution,” said Mansoor Raza, the coordinator of the CWS disaster program. “The solution to emergencies lies in preparedness.”
Even though 17 of its staff lost family members to the quake, CWS moved fast in the wake of the tragedy. It was the first organization to get tents into Batagram, quickly moving 600 shelter kits it had pre-positioned in a Karachi warehouse. Many were airdropped by Pakistan Army helicopters into remote villages.
“At the hour of our greatest need, it was CWS that came to the rescue of our people,” said Brigadier General Khalid Mehmood Ahmed, the coordinator of the army’s relief efforts in Batagram.
Yet Pervez claims CWS’ initial response could have been even better given the severity of the emergency. He wants CWS to pre-position 5,000 tents around the country in preparation for future disasters. “Each tent saves many lives,” he said.
Pervez said the quake showed several areas where CWS -- and the government -- need to improve their preparation.
“The first search and rescue team to reach the earthquake area came all the way from Great Britain, and it took 22 hours for them to reach here. That’s great, and we appreciate their sacrifice and help. But why don’t we have our own rescue teams trained and ready to go here, teams that could reach affected areas faster and thus save even more lives?” Pervez asked.
In addition to rethinking its approach to disaster preparedness and mitigation, CWS is also making sure that its current disaster response doesn’t contribute to future crises. That means doing things differently than they’ve been done in the past.
CWS is working with Arif Hasan, a renowned Pakistani architect and urban planner, to develop a manual for village-level masons. As CWS helps villagers rebuild their homes and schools, Raza says the manual will help in the creation of “seismic-sensitive” structures that can withstand the frequent tremors which still continue to shake the steep valleys in Pakistan’s north.
“We’re also going to help the survivors salvage what they can from the rubble, so as not to put more pressure on the environment,” Raza said. “Abuse of the environment contributed to the landslides that the earthquake provoked.”
Linking its disaster response to underlying issues of vulnerability is a key component of CWS’ emergency response.
“If I’m a rich person I want to replace everything I lost in the quake, so there’s a greater demand for wood to build my new house and new furniture. That demand will generate more timber mafia in these rural areas, which will mean more deforestation and thus more landslides,” Raza said. “We have to do a better job of linking these micro level issues of rural communities with the macro level problems of society.”
Don’t Blame Nature
CWS, which was established here in 1954, has taken a leading role among non-governmental organizations responding to the quake. It coordinates the Pakistan Humanitarian Forum, which meets regularly to share information and coordinate response among 40 private groups involved in the disaster response.
The quake also underscores the importance of CWS’ Emergency Response Center, which the organization set up to examine the four elements that Raza says are central to tackling preparedness: environmental issues, governance, demographics, and emergency response.
“The Center is a space where all the stakeholders can come together and dialogue about these issues. We collect information about the four variables and disseminate it to all the relevant actors, including NGOs [non-governmental organizations], civil society groups, the media, and government officials,” said Raza. That generates discussion, CWS officials hope, about the structural problems that translate into vulnerability at the local level.
According to Bishop Samuel Azariah of the Raiwind Diocese of the Church of Pakistan, the hundreds of school buildings that collapsed during the quake, entombing thousands of children, are a dramatic indicator of how nature can’t take all the blame for the region’s suffering.
“The quake reveals problems of bad management. Many of the schools that collapsed were built with World Bank money, and there was bad management, lack of foresight, and probably corruption in the construction of these schools. They often weren’t constructed with the best materials available. It’s a nightmare that will take us many years to get over,” Azariah said.
Joseph said making buildings more earthquake resistant is one of the obvious lessons learned in the quake, but it will require significant cultural changes in the isolated northern villages. “The contractors who built the schools wanted to make as much money as they could, and they didn't always use the right materials. And most of them aren’t engineers; they’re just a guy with a pickup truck who knows how to pile up bricks until they make a house or a school. As we reconstruct, we need to rethink the style of buildings we build, and start making them earthquake resistant,” he said.
The earthquake is likely to have far reaching consequences for Pakistan’s political institutions, including the military. Although some observers have criticized the army for taking advantage of the emergency to cement its control over a strategically important area and dominate the relief effort, Joseph says that the military’s involvement was necessary.
“There’s a lot of debate about the army’s involvement. But there was no way out except by using their resources. It was the only institution with the necessary material and human resources. And the biggest blessing we had was their helicopters, because road access was totally cut off. We used the army’s capacity to the maximum. The airdrops in those early weeks were critically important. Without them we would have had the things ready but not been able to reach the people,” he said.
Joseph said the army also played a key role in maintaining order in a chaotic situation where fights often broke out over tents and other relief supplies. He said CWS hasn’t lost a single tent to looting, in part because of support from the military.
“Many people tend to think the army should stay in its barracks,” Joseph said, “but the civil administration was totally destroyed in the quake. There was no local government left in many areas, and the army was needed to quickly fill that void.”
Raza, who directs the Emergency Response Center, suggests the quake’s destruction highlights the hard structural questions that need to be asked by NGOs, civil society groups, and other stakeholders in the emergency response.
“After 57 years of independence from Britain, why does a man in the center of the North-West Frontier Province not have even a road into his village? If there’s a health unit there, why is there no doctor? These kinds of shocks are expected in this region, but why did planners seem unaware of this? Why weren’t there plans on how to deal with this crisis? The biggest lesson learned in this earthquake is that we have to put pressure on the right circles to spend rightly on the right people,” he said.
Raza suggests one of the most important tasks for private relief groups is to realize the limits of what they can do.
“In a disaster, NGOs can only fill the gap. It’s the responsibility of the government, not the NGOs, to protect its citizens. We’re doing our best, but we don’t have helicopters. We are relatively devoid of resources, but the state institutions are well equipped. It’s all a matter of priorities. This disaster puts into question the whole issue of governance in this country,” he said.
Solidarity Needed Now
Those questions hang in the cold air as winter settles over the northern mountains of Pakistan. CWS, along with United Nations agencies and dozens of other organizations, is in a race against time to provide shelter and support to thousands of families who still remain homeless more than seven weeks after the earthquake.
The United Nations said on November 25 that it had received $216 million for short-term emergency relief, only 39 percent of the amount it says it needs. UN officials warned it was now or never for many quake victims still in need of shelter and assistance.
As if to underscore the dire warning, heavy snow started falling in many areas on November 27, halting helicopter flights and closing several mountain roads.
Aid workers also face a race against indifference, as the images of rubble in northern Pakistan are replaced on the world’s stage by scenes from newer crises appealing for attention.
Solidarity, Bishop Azariah suggests, is needed for the long haul.
“The work of rehabilitation and resettling people will be the most tedious, difficult, and costly part of responding to the earthquake,” he said. “But by then the world will have forgotten the situation. It will no longer be on the TV screens of the world. Yet that’s precisely when we’ll need more money and professional help. We’re preparing to do what we can, but we’re also going to need our sisters and brothers to help us.”
Or call 1-800-LWR-LWR-2 or mail a donation to:
Lutheran World Relief
South Asia Earthquake
P.O. Box 17061
Baltimore, MD 21298-9832
