Update on the Crew

Surprisingly and fortunately, this has been the mildest winter Kashmir has seen in years. About +25C during the day, and a mild +2C at night. They have received one week of precipitation, leaving areas in the valleys with 2 feet of water, and the higher elevated areas with minimal snow.

Coming back to our tent camp in Chattar Kallas has been amazing. Turkish Red Crescent have stepped up during our absence. They have replaced all single ply tents with winterized double ply tents. They have supplied as well 2 huge school tents.

pic of the "new" Chattar Kallas tent camp

WFP (World Food Program) have been supplying our camp with dry food rations, such as oil, rice and lentils, allowing families to slowly gain independence and enabling them to shortly start migrating back towards their homeland, or what is left of it.

A team of 4 Cuban doctors attend our camp daily to check up on injuries and illnesses.

Save the Children have set up 2 play tents where the children can borrow toys to play with. With easy accessibility to toys and games, the children are cooperating more with each other and fighting amongst each other has decreased a significant amount.

The government has supplied every tent with gas stoves. Unfortunately, these mountain people aren't used to using these stoves, and we've had 3 tents already go up in flames. Fortunately only mild injuries resulted from these fires. Now these stoves are being removed from all tents.

pic of Sarah playing "hokie-pokie" with the kids

The government aims to close all tent village camps by March 31st 2006 to start phase 2 of earthquake relief work: construction of permanent houses and schools. We've tagged along with different members of Dewan group who are starting reconstruction of permanent structures in Mistumba, Hatian tehsil of Muzafarrabad district.

Mistumba

pics from left to right: 1:remains of girls' highschool. 2: Primary school. 3: Shops from bazaar that have been detached from roadside.

Facts of Mistumba:

• All houses are in non-habitable conditions
• There are 700 families in this region, only 350 families have received 5 CGI sheets each, which is enough for building emergency shelters but not enough for building permanent houses. The required amount is at least 10-12 CGI sheets per family.
• We are short of at least 5000 sheets for the housing and another 2000 for the schools.
• The only NGO present in this area at the moment is IOM (International organization for Migration), who are supplying CGI sheets for the roofs.
• We aim to supply this region with another wood cutting saw so that hopefully all houses and schools can be rebuilt in the next year. Talking to villagers of this region, their main concern is to get schools back up and water running.

We'll be talking with different NGO's in the next few days, seeing how they can maybe assist us in this project.

# posted by pakistan ground team @ 4:18 AM