Quake Survivors Vulnerable to Bitter Cold in the Mountains

Abdul Haleem is an old man with a weak heart. The icy mountain wind that rattles his walls made of flour sacks and splintered wood gives him the feeling he’s not long for this world.

Good sense, and the ashes of a neighbor’s tent, tell the 65-year-old earthquake survivor that he’s crazy to build a fire inside his cramped shelter. His low ceiling of plastic sacks is already scorched black and melted in several spots.

But the wind bites clear through to his aching bones and makes him crave heat. So each day about 2 p.m., when the sun drops behind the Himalaya mountains, he takes a handful of the pine needles that blanket his dirt floor, mixes them with dried corn-cob kindling and starts a fire that he knows could kill him.

“I feel cold even under the sun,” Haleem said, squatting to warm his numb hands over the low flames. “I’m scared, but I have no other choice. It’s too cold. I have to make a fire.”

Ten weeks after a magnitude 7.6 earthquake on Oct. 8 devastated towns and villages across northern Pakistan, killing more than 80,000 people and rendering 3.5 million homeless, tens of thousands of survivors still don’t have adequate shelter for the winter.

The cold reportedly has caused several deaths in the stricken area, including those of two children who died of pneumonia last month and a man who succumbed to exposure.

A recent survey by the Pakistani government and foreign relief agencies estimates that 230,000 people live outside organized camps, three-quarters of them with inadequate shelter.

At least 2.5 million people are living in tents or emergency shelters at elevations below 5,000 feet, the United Nations said in its Dec. 9 update. But as many as 400,000 more are in “risk areas” at higher altitudes, where snow is normally several feet deep by January.

Haleem lives at about 4,600 feet, overlooking the broad Alai Valley about 75 miles north of Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.

By this time last year, when the region suffered its worst winter in two decades, there was at least 5 feet of snow here. Now there are only patches of ice on bare ground, and a biting wind from the snow-covered peaks.

Heavy snow is bound to hit the village, Haleem said. It usually does. Yet he and his 35 children and grandchildren, who live in a cluster of seven tents and huts in their terraced field, refuse to move down to the warmer valley floor, where the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has set up a tent camp.

“We live here peacefully and we love our honor,” said Abdullah Niamullah, 24, one of Haleem’s neighbors. “And I’ve got my few possessions here. If I move from this place, someone will come and occupy it. He will immediately cut down my trees and take away my belongings.

“And even if I go down to the valley, what will I do there? I can’t work. Here, I have my land, and at least I can grow something to live on.”

Like many mountain holdouts, Niamullah first built a mud-brick shelter for his two cows. If they die, the family loses its best hope for a normal life some day. Now he is rebuilding the stone walls of his collapsed house, though he has to stop frequently to warm his stiff fingers.

“Our skin becomes so hard that we can’t move our hands properly, and they start to bleed,” he said.

Few of the village’s children have winter coats or sweaters, and none have gloves or socks to wear inside their cracked plastic shoes.

The U.N. says it urgently needs about 2.4 million blankets suitable for winter and 1.2 million quilts for quake survivors.

Foreign donors have delivered aid or made commitments worth just more than $209 million, or 38% of the $550 million that the U.N. asked for in emergency relief for quake victims, the world body reported Dec. 9.

In the city of Muzaffarabad, the International Committee of the Red Cross runs a hospital out of a few dozen tents pitched on the field of a half-built cricket stadium. Its doctors have treated several people for pneumonia, and frequently see patients with upper respiratory tract infections, spokesperson Jessica Barry said.

Three of the patients suffered burns in tent fires, and Barry said the Red Cross was anticipating an increase in the number of burn victims over the coming weeks.

In the nearby Neelum Valley, on Pakistan’s side of the disputed territory of Kashmir, people living in high mountain villages complain that children and the elderly are falling ill because their tents are too flimsy.

Each morning, as many as 120 people come down from the mountains to see doctors at a medical camp run by the Red Cross in the riverside town of Pattika, about 10 miles northeast of Muzaffarabad.

Five to 10 people among each day’s new patients are suspected pneumonia cases, Dr. Yves Dugerdil, a Swiss member of the Red Cross, said. He is bracing for a big increase in the number of sick children younger than 5, who he said were too weak to weather temperatures that would drop to 15 degrees or less.

“People can’t build fires, so it will be nearly as cold inside as outside,” Dugerdil said. “And there will be snow. So probably it will be catastrophic.”

Last week, two Pakistani workers with the U.N.’s World Food Program were brought to the Pattika medical camp suffering burns from a tent fire.

“One was very severe,” Dugerdil said. “Perhaps he will die in Muzaffarabad. We don’t know.”

For a few hours each day when the sunlight strikes Haleem’s village of Bandi Peza, he walks with a steel rod shaped into a cane, trying to find someplace warm. He wears most of what he owns under a used tweed jacket that he got from an aid worker.

Haleem has gone down to the valley floor several times to a Pakistan army camp to ask for a winter tent. But the soldiers demanded a note signed by someone of influence, such as a member of parliament or a notable bureaucrat.

Pakistanis call such notes the “parchi system,” a euphemism for plain old corruption. Haleem says there’s no way a weak old man with nothing can win at that game.

“Every time I go there, they say, ‘Do you have a parchi?’ ” he said. “I’m an uneducated person. Where would I get a parchi?”