Week 6 & Week 7

Week six began in Islamabad with two neat black tape and clear plastic hand-bound A3 documents checked and rechecked and sitting on my desk ready to travel the short cross-sector journey to the offices of NESPAK. After an initial false start on Tuesday, by the following morning, as I sat in a battered 4x4 named Rocky twisting through dawn-orange, spaghetti-westernesque landscape en-route to Kashmir, the drawings were conveyed across town by a colleague and we successfully received approval three days later. That these latest designs were accepted without amendment was not unexpected - they are downsized versions of our first approved house type so there was good reason to believe we would have a positive response - nonetheless, it is a relief to have this package complete so that the focus can now be primarily on construction.

That Wednesday morning journey heralded my second visit to Kashmir, this time equipped with copies of the newly prepared drawings to distribute amongst the Muslim Aid site engineers based in Bagh. During my stay I was to learn that the Kashmiri’s have a song beginning, “My country, my country, just like paradise…” and leaving aside several decades of political turmoil and some quite severe poverty in places (not minor issues but humour me!), the undulating, forested landscape gives strength to this boast with every twist and turn of the road. I had intended, after a week or so, to travel onwards to the NWFP and Jared but the security situation in Swat resulted in an ERRA warning that foreign NGO workers should pull out of the area. This is certainly frustrating – I have not yet spent enough time with the team at Jared to ensure that work is progressing as it should – but we are implementing a long term development project not emergency relief work and can afford to wait until the situation improves.

First task upon arrival in a busy Bagh was to drive through the narrow, people-cluttered streets to the UN-HABITAT compound that occupies a pleasant, hillside location above the main town. UN-HABITAT have been working in the earthquake effected areas to provide training and resources to partner NGO's and to lobby government authorities to ensure that inspection of reconstruction and subsequent disbursement of funds to beneficiaries is undertaken with transparency and free from corruption. A sceptical observer might suggest, with regard to corruption, that they've set themselves a difficult task and i'd be inclined to agree! However, despite the complexities involved, the work of UN-HABITAT is resulting in steady improvement accross the board and as a reflection of this proactive spirit the local carpenters who are based at the compound had agreed to prepare some timber joint-samples as per our drawings...it was time to collect! Thankfully, these men didn’t let me down (of all people, you hope the UN won’t!) and the full-size samples constructed will prove invaluable as a means to communicate what is required to field staff and labourers by covering some areas that have been lost in translation through drawings and description alone.

The team at Bagh have begun a new cluster of 16 houses so we were up and down the mountain checking on sites and monitoring demarcation work which is completed quickly and simply using nylon thread, steel bars to mark the gridlines and lime powder to mark the trenches. Subsequent excavation is carried out by labourers, the majority of whom are Pataans, Pashto speakers from the NWFP or Afghanistan. Although the butt of many jokes that openly suggest they are “mental” and “dangerous”, these men are respected for their strength and toughness and they certainly prove these qualities during the long and arduous labour required to break through the hard, stone filled ground. On occasion the stones prove too big to remove with man power alone so we call in the blasters. This is a typically low-tech affair – they drill a hole, pour in the powder, fix a fuse, then we all scamper up the hill a hundred yards or so until it goes BOOM! Fair to say that health and safety is a loose concept among these men but they all had a full complement of fingers and thumbs so I guess their professional credentials are in order!

A recurring issue in the Bagh area is the problem of getting materials from the nearest road to the beneficiary’s plot. Sometimes this can be overcome by a nearby donkey or tractor-accessible track, but it might also mean trekking up to 2 miles along an extremely steep, uneven and rock strewn collection of interlocking trails traversing the hillside. From experience I know this to be exhausting work with only a pen and notepad weighing you down! For the widows and orphaned children who are some of the chosen beneficiaries, hauling a bag of cement or sand or a load of timber, in such conditions, is not physically possible. Under the terms of the agreement with Muslim Aid it is the beneficiary’s responsibility to provide this timber and, if necessary, arrange and pay for the carriage of materials. The reasoning here being the obligation to do so will help to engender a spirit of ownership and involvement with the build process which a straightforward gift of a paid-for house will not. That is the theory; unfortunately for precisely the reasons that result in their selection - namely severe poverty and vulnerability – several beneficiaries are, at present, unable to provide what is required. This is no fault of the beneficiaries or Muslim Aid who are working hard to resolve such issues and meet the needs of those selected by the local community to benefit from NGO assistance. For the time being the unavoidably imperfect solution is to focus on building now for those who have the available materials. Later, once these houses are complete, we will return to the cases where these problems have caused delay and assess what can be done.



The evening I returned to Islamabad emergency rule was in full swing but aside from an increase in razor wire and bored looking soldiers manning guns at road junctions, life in the capital has been unexpectedly quiet. That protest has been less than I might have anticipated since this drastic government action may be due to the arrest of those who would lead such a movement and the suppression of local independent media. Nonetheless, there is a strong sense that Islamabad’s currently serene face could turn angry with very little provocation. Politics is never less than interesting in Pakistan!

Although it would be a gross exaggeration to say that people here are living in fear; more and more it becomes apparent that anxiety and paranoia are felt by the general population as an undercurrent tugging at even the most mundane activities. Worry disrupts the rhythm of daily life and so, alongside the politicians and the generals and the mullahs and the fighters and the many perceived and real disruptive influences from abroad, subtly contributes to a sense of instability. In a modern, relatively prosperous city like Islamabad, if you walk into a bookshop and see your country branded by a prominent international magazine as the most dangerous country on earth it has an effect! Whilst in the bookshop you might wonder if today the market will fall victim to a bomber! Hopefully not, but perhaps its time to limit how often you come into town just in case!

Work gets held up too, as I discovered this week when a scheduled meeting was cancelled because the UN office where it was to be held evacuated all personnel due to security concerns. Travelling with a colleague on a seperate occasion, our taxi was cut up and hit by another car. The motorist-agressor (a picture of orange bearded fury!) was quick to remonstrate and threaten our driver with the police, heedless to the fact that it was his risky manoeuvre that caused the collision. Ultimately we didn’t stop and wait for the authorities - it was a minor contact, we were not at fault and local knowledge made it clear that the police would likely look for a contribution to the force benevolent fund! My colleague later confided to me that during this incident he became concerned thinking, if we stopped, there might be unexpected consequences for the foreigner in the back. At the time I had not considered this a possibility. Perhaps I should have; but then at what point does legitimate awareness of security end and that creeping, destabilising paranoia begin?