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Pakistan Update: Church World Service Re-Opens Damaged Clinic to Serve Survivors, Expedites Aid

October 14, 2005

Recent disaster training helped one teacher save lives at his school.

ISLAMABAD--Mushtaq Ahmad, a teacher in Pakistan's Mansehra area, was able to help save students and teachers at his school when the region's devastating earthquake struck, thanks to what he'd learned, ironically, just days before the quake in a disaster preparedness teachers training.

When a Church World Service emergency response team encountered Ahmad this week while assessing survivors' needs, Ahmad told them he was in the classroom teaching his students when the quake hit. He said he was able to quickly evacuate the majority of the school's children and teachers by applying in earnest the skills he had just learned in a Disaster Preparedness Teachers Training conducted by the same agency, Church World Service's Pakistan-Afghanistan Regional Office.

"Because of the training, I was able to help save not only my own life but those of our students and fellow teachers," Ahmad said. Church World Service, active in Pakistan for the past 50 years, has trained over 2,000 teachers in disaster preparedness in the past year.

A UN official touring the area warned that time is running out to aid many of the quake's still unreached survivors, as another powerful aftershock rocked Islamabad, sending residents fleeing to the streets.

International agency Church World Service reports that its emergency aid teams and other rescue groups are nonetheless making inroads. "But," says the agency's Pakistan/Afghanistan director Marvin Parvez, "this is going to be remembered as the earthquake that killed the children."

Parvez said, "We received beautiful news of four children being rescued from one school," but with occasional good news about rescued survivors, reports from the scene have otherwise been extremely bleak.

"There are recovered bodies of children being set outside of schools, ready for burial," Parvez reported. "As a parent, this is very difficult to see."

CWS Pakistan-Afghanistan offices in Karachi, Islamabad, Mansehra and Murree are organizing relief efforts, assessing needs and determining longer-term CWS response focus. With offices throughout the region, Church World Service was on the ground responding to the massive quake with immediate initial supplies of tents or "shelter kits" and food.

CWS to provide medical assistance to 100,000

Through its global resources, CWS's Parvez says the agency will provide medical assistance to 100,000 people impacted by the quake--half in Azad Kashmir and half in the Northwest Frontier Province--through two health centers. Parvez says CWS staff immediately began providing immunizations and first aid, and that the health centers are now being organized to continue that work. The aid is focusing on women, children and vulnerable families who are without food and shelter and have taken refuge under the open sky.

He added, "It's a horror story that doesn't end. You find yet another village that has been flattened by this earthquake and we are all still struggling to reach remote villages, rescue those survivors or retrieve bodies."

Church World Service Pakistan--chair of the Pakistan Humanitarian Forum (PHF), a collaboration of international humanitarian and emergency response agencies in Pakistan--and other members of that group are going out in teams to assess damage and needs.

Parvez says the need and the cry continues for clean drinking water, food, tents and medicines. "People are getting colds and fevers due to living in the open air, cold and wet weather and poor shelter conditions," he said.

Church World Service's office and health clinic in Mansehra were damaged by the quake, but the clinic is now cleared, open, and serving survivors needing medical care.

Parvez said people are still being given first aid at open places and in the streets. Helicopters have been shifting injured people to hospitals in Murree, Abbottabad, and other hospitals.

CWS's Parvez said earthquake survivors are pleading for coffins and assistance to bury the dead bodies lying in the rubble.

Azad Kashmir devastated, no survivors in some villages

CWS further reports that areas ahead of Balakot town and Gari Habib Ullah are not yet accessible. From Washington, Church World Service Emergency Response Program Director Donna J. Derr says that Muzaffarabad, the capital of Azad Kashmir, is devastated.

"In Abbottabad [in the Northwest Frontier Province], a girls high school of 1,100 students was destroyed," she said, and only a few students could be evacuated. "At a primary school in Balakot only 25 of its 175 students could be saved. The grief here is enormous and demands particular care, now and in coming weeks," she said.

Parvez said, "The worst hit place was Bagh, 40 kilometers southeast of Muzaffarabad. There are no survivors in villages like Jaglari, Kufalgarh, Harigal, and Baniyali in Bagh district."

International aid began to pour in yesterday with aircraft loaded with supplies came from the United States, Britain, Japan, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, including high-tech cameras for finding buried survivors, according to a CNN report. India, Russia, China and Germany have also offered assistance.

From its U.S. headquarters, Church World Service has issued an initial national fundraising appeal for $7.9 million to support emergency phase relief in the region.

Contributions to support these efforts may be sent to:
Church World Service
Southern Asia Earthquake--#6979
P.O. Box 968
Elkhart, IN 46515

Contributions may also be made online, or by calling 800.297.1516, ext. 222.

Media Contact:
Lesley Crosson, CWS/New York, 212-870-2676;
Jan Dragin, 781-925-1526;

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