Earthquake Relief Efforts

The SMSs started to come in on my phone the night of the earthquake, Saturday last, around 2 AM: "Kindly deposit any kind of clothing, blankets, etc. or other non perishable items at PAF MUSEUM New Parking Lot Sunday 9th October. Pakistan Air Force and Army looking for your help for the earthquake victims. Kindly pass this message on to as many people as possible."

In the morning we quickly collected clothes, shoes, and an entire first aid kit that I had assembled for my family after the Gujrat earthquake of 2003. We’d never used the items in it and I could think of forty thousand people who needed it more than we would. We sent the items off to the PAF Museum and will be sending blankets and other larger items later on - the drive will continue for as long as it is needed.

In the afternoon we turned on the television to TV One, the channel that was sponsoring the drive, and saw Faakhir e Alaam, the Pakistani musician, who was standing in the parking lot of the museum and appealing to people to send items. But what was truly amazing was the inflow of people, coming from all over Karachi, on foot, on motorcycles, in cars, clutching packets, bags, doris, and bundles of items. Piles of clothing were growing in a huge mountain; people had bought boxes of mineral water and juice and were bringing them in to the drive; people took out blankets and pillows from their closets and had sent them to the drive.

By the end of the day the organizers had receieved enough items to fill four C-130s and send them up North, and trucks packed with the items were trundling out of the parking lot and up to the airport. The organizers told viewers that they had received enough clothing; what they needed now was medicine and volunteers to come help sort out the items.

The drive will continue for as many days as needed, and there is also a camp set up outside PNS Shifa to receive blankets and other items; flights are going every hour up to the affected areas.

I’m told that there are relief camps set up everywhere, by Edhi, Ansar Burney, and many other welfare trusts and organizations. The people of Karachi, unable to believe that they didn’t feel anything of the tremendous devastation that has destroyed so many parts of the northern areas, have been doing what they can to reach out to their brothers and sisters in Kashmir, NWFP, and Islamabad. Gone are the ethnic suspicions, gone are the resentments and grudges that the south holds for the north, replaced by grief and the desire to help.

The question "What can we do" is something that Karachi people aren’t very comfortable - they are at their best when they are doing something, and the amazing spread of the relief camp news througth SMS to people from every social strata and circumstance has been a minor miracle. Equally heartening was the sight of a British search and rescue team arriving in Islamabad to help dig out people from the collapsed Margalla Towers. They had already rescued two people this morning on their arrival from Manchester, and their calm and technical know-how has done a lot to boost the moral of the people in Islamabad.

There have been fights and arguments that the government has not been doing enough, and eyewitness accounts say that there was great chaos when the earthquake struck. But who would not be caught horribly off-guard by something of this magnitude? One of the problems is that of organization and the other is that of access, because most of the roads up to the affected areas in Kashmir and NWFP are blocked - landslides have finished what the earthquake began.

At any rate, what we need now from everyone is compassion on all levels. Send us your prayers. Send us your financial donations. Send us food, blankets, clothes, tents, medicines, anything that you can spare. Send us your good will and send us your emotional support. If you’ve got links to people who can send helicopters, do that too. The people of Pakistan have never seen such a disaster since the earthquake in Quetta that killed fifty thousand people in 1935, and not many of us alive today were alive then to remember it. We are in shock and grief, but we want to act to help as many as we can. We have to act quickly, however, because time is the resource that we can’t ever have enough of when it comes to freeing someone trapped under fifteen tons of rubble.

Pray for us.