Quake haunts survivors of Pakistan's lost generation
Agence France Presse
April 7, 2006
Traumatised by aftershocks and riven by grief, some Pakistani children are still too scared to enter the new classrooms that are rising from the rubble of the earthquake six months ago.
"I just don't want to go inside," says student Manoona Zahra, 17. Her two best friends were among the 157 girls who died when the two-storey Government Girls' College in Muzaffarabad collapsed on October 8, 2005.
"It's an unknown fear. I'm not even quite sure what I'm afraid of, but I know I don't want to go into the buildings."
Teachers too have faced their demons. Zina Tasnam, who spent three hours trapped in the wreckage, has only just returned to work at the college in the capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir.
"I can remember the feeling of the dying girls under me," says Zina, dabbing her eyes with her headscarf. "I could feel their bodies in the dark. I felt they were alive. Then I felt they were no longer alive."
Like most of the nearly 8,000 schools destroyed by the quake, Government Girls' College now consists of little but a few ragged tents.
A Turkish aid group has just built an earthquake-proof new classroom block, but acting principal Syeda Kosar says many of the college's grey-veiled girls are "too frightened" to use it yet.
Children accounted for almost half of the 73,000 people in Pakistan who died in the giant 7.6-magnitude earthquake, and most were in school when they perished. Thousands of teachers were also killed.
At the time Pakistani officials spoke of a "whole generation" being lost.
Some 1,700 aftershocks, some of them stronger than 6.0 on the Richter scale, have terrorised the survivors.
In the past six months, getting children back to school has been a top priority -- partly to avoid disrupting their education, and partly to return some normality to the shattered lives of young people who in many cases lost siblings or parents.
Save the Children says that some 300,000 Pakistani youngsters remain "desperate" to return to school.
But getting them there throws up many problems.
Many schools in the disaster zone reopened around one month after the earthquake but all of them have had meagre resources.
At the Ali Akbar Awan state-run boys' school in Muzaffarabad, another set of Turkish-built classrooms is set to be inaugurated next week, says relieved headmaster Abdur Rauf Jadoon. Four of his pupils and a teacher died.
"They were scared to come back to school and are still scared of the classrooms. But they are very brave," he says. "It was difficult to teach in tents in winter. We are very grateful for these new buildings."
One of the biggest challenges has been to educate hundreds of thousands of children who fled their devastated villages in the mountains and came to live in vast tent camps in the cities.
Temporary tent schools using "school in a box" kits from the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) sprung up in the camps, providing basic education for some 75,000 children.
Hardline Islamic groups, including some known for fighting against Indian rule in its part of Kashmir, have also set up schools.
"We have built some 33 shelter schools and other institutions, and we have distributed books, bags and uniforms," said Ghulamullah Azad, Kashmir spokesman for Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the political wing of the banned militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.
However many tent schools are closing down as quake refugees start to return home, after Pakistani authorities fixed March 31 as the deadline for the end of relief operations and the beginning of the rebuilding phase.
"It's getting warm and refugees are starting to return so we have to make sure we know what they are going back to in terms of schools, and also in terms of health and water facilities," says UNICEF education officer Chiharu Kondo.
An unexpected dividend from the tent schools is that many girls -- and some boys -- from conservative areas have started to attend school for the first time, she says.
Aid groups are devising ways of keeping these new students in school, including offering parents an incentive of extra cooking oil if they send their girls and even by ensuring separate toilets for both sexes, says Kondo.
But the most important task is to ensure that the new schools will be able to survive future earthquakes, she adds.
"Our motto is to 'build back better'," Kondo says.
Copyright © 2006 Agence France Presse.
April 7, 2006
Traumatised by aftershocks and riven by grief, some Pakistani children are still too scared to enter the new classrooms that are rising from the rubble of the earthquake six months ago.
"I just don't want to go inside," says student Manoona Zahra, 17. Her two best friends were among the 157 girls who died when the two-storey Government Girls' College in Muzaffarabad collapsed on October 8, 2005.
"It's an unknown fear. I'm not even quite sure what I'm afraid of, but I know I don't want to go into the buildings."
Teachers too have faced their demons. Zina Tasnam, who spent three hours trapped in the wreckage, has only just returned to work at the college in the capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir.
"I can remember the feeling of the dying girls under me," says Zina, dabbing her eyes with her headscarf. "I could feel their bodies in the dark. I felt they were alive. Then I felt they were no longer alive."
Like most of the nearly 8,000 schools destroyed by the quake, Government Girls' College now consists of little but a few ragged tents.
A Turkish aid group has just built an earthquake-proof new classroom block, but acting principal Syeda Kosar says many of the college's grey-veiled girls are "too frightened" to use it yet.
Children accounted for almost half of the 73,000 people in Pakistan who died in the giant 7.6-magnitude earthquake, and most were in school when they perished. Thousands of teachers were also killed.
At the time Pakistani officials spoke of a "whole generation" being lost.
Some 1,700 aftershocks, some of them stronger than 6.0 on the Richter scale, have terrorised the survivors.
In the past six months, getting children back to school has been a top priority -- partly to avoid disrupting their education, and partly to return some normality to the shattered lives of young people who in many cases lost siblings or parents.
Save the Children says that some 300,000 Pakistani youngsters remain "desperate" to return to school.
But getting them there throws up many problems.
Many schools in the disaster zone reopened around one month after the earthquake but all of them have had meagre resources.
At the Ali Akbar Awan state-run boys' school in Muzaffarabad, another set of Turkish-built classrooms is set to be inaugurated next week, says relieved headmaster Abdur Rauf Jadoon. Four of his pupils and a teacher died.
"They were scared to come back to school and are still scared of the classrooms. But they are very brave," he says. "It was difficult to teach in tents in winter. We are very grateful for these new buildings."
One of the biggest challenges has been to educate hundreds of thousands of children who fled their devastated villages in the mountains and came to live in vast tent camps in the cities.
Temporary tent schools using "school in a box" kits from the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) sprung up in the camps, providing basic education for some 75,000 children.
Hardline Islamic groups, including some known for fighting against Indian rule in its part of Kashmir, have also set up schools.
"We have built some 33 shelter schools and other institutions, and we have distributed books, bags and uniforms," said Ghulamullah Azad, Kashmir spokesman for Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the political wing of the banned militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.
However many tent schools are closing down as quake refugees start to return home, after Pakistani authorities fixed March 31 as the deadline for the end of relief operations and the beginning of the rebuilding phase.
"It's getting warm and refugees are starting to return so we have to make sure we know what they are going back to in terms of schools, and also in terms of health and water facilities," says UNICEF education officer Chiharu Kondo.
An unexpected dividend from the tent schools is that many girls -- and some boys -- from conservative areas have started to attend school for the first time, she says.
Aid groups are devising ways of keeping these new students in school, including offering parents an incentive of extra cooking oil if they send their girls and even by ensuring separate toilets for both sexes, says Kondo.
But the most important task is to ensure that the new schools will be able to survive future earthquakes, she adds.
"Our motto is to 'build back better'," Kondo says.
Copyright © 2006 Agence France Presse.
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