Friday, November 11, 2005

 

Dear Friends

The team of Karavan Leaders would like to thank all its friends and well wishers for the active support offered to us at this time of crisis. Needless to say that it was your support that made it possible for us reach out to survivors of the earthquake and offer shelter and assistance.

After our efforts in Siran and Kaghan valley, we are happy to inform you that the engineers of Pakistan Army have opened the roads in these valleys - making it possible for the mainstream relief agencies to provide assistance and help.

Yesterday three of our members have been picked up by WFP & UN, to work on their project of village assessments, so Wahab, Qudrat and Sabit are now working with them.

Now we focusing on the Upper Neelam valley, where roads are still badly damaged and it might take a long time before they can be opened for traffic. The villages are getting daily help from the aerial drops of army and UN. The tricky situation is that the villages are short of not only shelter, but food supply is also a critical issue. The authorities told us that with the clear weather, they are able to provide enough relief rations that are good enough for just a day. So if the bad weather strikes then it would not be possible for them to ferry the rations by air. This would make the situation extremely critical for villagers.

There is need for the land route to be studied and to explore the possibilities of supplying rations by land, as this would then be the main supply chain. There have been efforts made by locals and also by relief agencies to make it possible, yet numerous difficulties have hindered progress on the land route. One of the main reasons is disappearance of a relief team on this route, possibly swept away by the landslides as aftershocks turn the landslides active.

We have been requested to work on this problem, to study the route by foot and mark the points where distribution centers can be established for the effected villages. The stretch of 60/70 km from road head to last effected village shall be our target.

We start this night from Lahore and tomorrow morning from Islamabad to Muzaffarabad. Then we take the road north from Muzaffarabad into Neelam Valley . The road is expected to be open (subject to active slides) up to the town of Patika, some 34 km from Muzaffarabad, this shall be our Camp 1. We start the trek from here and it might take us a week or maybe 10 days to do the assessment, to identify the effected villages that are willing to send their strong men down to Camp 1 for colleting and transporting rations and shelter. We would also study the possibility of forming further supply stations in the valley, that can be approached by the villages in that circle.

 

The team

 

Thanks & best regards

Tayyab Syed