As winter looms, quake victims resist evacuation

PROOT KALAY, Pakistan —High on the wall of an isolated valley, Atiqullah, his wife and eight children are struggling to stay alive. They huddle for warmth in a makeshift shelter of plastic and wood, ration meager supplies of rice and turnips and dread the onset of winter snows that soon will blanket their destroyed village in drifts as tall as a man.

A schoolteacher and farmer who uses one name, Atiqullah, 43, said he knows that one option available is evacuation. Family members could pack their paltry belongings and hike 12 miles to the nearest town, where they presumably could find shelter in one of the relief camps springing up at lower elevations.

But he is not willing to trade the family's self-reliant life for a future as destitute refugees, despite risks inherent in that choice. "I will stay here with my cattle," said Atiqullah, a whip-thin Pashtun tribesman with hawklike features and a piercing gaze. "I will die here."

Therein lies the dilemma for the Pakistan government and foreign-aid agencies as they struggle with the aftermath of the massive Oct. 8 earthquake now blamed for as many as 80,000 deaths, tens of thousands of injuries and a homeless population of more than 3 million people, many in mountains difficult to access in the best of times.

While many survivors have hiked out of the mountains in search of help, tens of thousands are spurning pleas from the army, in particular, to evacuate flattened villages — many cut off by landslides — for burgeoning relief camps where victims more easily can be provided with shelter, food and medical care.

In the Allai Valley in North-West Frontier Province, the army last month announced plans to evacuate as many as 80,000 people — by helicopter, on foot and by mule — from isolated villages that soon will be draped in snow. But the evacuation was suspended after one day when many villagers balked at leaving homes and croplands their families have occupied for generations, according to army officials.

Aid groups are developing plans to provide families with roofing material and other supplies that will allow them to repair damaged homes or build temporary winterized structures that — especially at higher altitudes — are considered preferable to tents, which in any case are in short supply.

Provided such shelters can be built before winter sets in, many relief officials say, the approach is preferable over the long run to housing victims in squalid tent cities where they run the risk of losing touch with communities and livelihoods.

U.N. officials complain that the world has not awakened to the earthquake's dimensions, warning that thousands of survivors are at potentially lethal risk from disease, hunger and exposure.

The United Nations estimates that 800,000 people are without shelter, 200,000 of them in remote, mostly high-altitude hamlets not yet reached by aid workers. "Hypothermia is very definitely a health risk," World Health Organization spokeswoman Sacha Bootsma said. "It's a main concern."

Some snow already has fallen at elevations of about 10,000 feet, and Pakistan's Meteorological Department said Saturday that more was likely in coming days at elevations as low as 5,000 feet. In the highest mountain hamlets, temperatures were expected to dip to 10 degrees, the department said.

U.N. officials recently said donor governments have provided only about 20 percent of the $550 million the United Nations has requested to fund relief operations for the next six months; the body's World Food Program said Thursday that some helicopters could be grounded within days.

Those figures, however, do not take into account aid that bypasses the U.N. relief apparatus. For example, the United States has committed about $100 million, most of which will be provided directly to the Pakistani government or private aid agencies, or used to fund helicopter flights and other relief activities by the American military, U.S. officials said.

Even with such bilateral assistance, said Jan Vandemoortele, the U.N. aid coordinator in Pakistan, the international response has been "thoroughly insufficient." U.N. officials say the relief effort is in many respects a much bigger challenge than last year's Asian tsunami, given the remoteness of areas hit by the quake.

One such area is the Allai Valley, home to about 190,000 people. Many live in tiny villages that cling to steep, forested mountainsides overlooking a twisting river with waters the color of jade. From its lower reaches near the town of Battagram, about 70 miles north of Islamabad, the valley runs north toward the rugged Kohistan mountains, now rimmed with early snow.

The army and relief groups have been extending their reach in the valley, whose road network largely has been blocked by landslides. About two weeks ago, an army platoon established a helicopter pad in the village of Bateela, about one mile from Proot Kalay, a smaller village home to about 500 people.

Lt. Wahab Khan, 21, the platoon commander, said he did not see any alternative. "The snow [soon] will fall down in these mountains," he said. "The people will die without shelter."

But to walk up the stony path to Proot Kalay is to understand the agonizing choice confronting many earthquake survivors.

Because most residents were working in the fields or at school at the time of the earthquake, only five people died in the village, which sits at the top of a small cliff at an altitude of about 6,300 feet. But the temblor spared little else, reducing mud-and-straw homes to mounds of earth and cutting off the supply of piped water. Atiqullah, the teacher, was in the high school about a mile away and escaped, along with 200 students and staff members, just before the building collapsed.

After spending the first night in the rain with his wife and children, Atiqullah set off with a nephew on foot for Battagram, which they reached after 14 hours, he said. They flagged down a van that drove them three hours to Abbottabad, where they purchased rolls of plastic sheeting before returning by the same route.

Using the plastic and salvaged timbers, Atiqullah fashioned a crude 18-by-15-foot shelter he shares with his wife, eight children and six others. Because it cannot accommodate a fire, the shelter provides scant protection against cold, and "on rainy days, all the water fills the tent," Atiqullah said in broken English. "Therefore I worry all the night and day, and no sleep. Where should I go?"

Making matters even more desperate, the earthquake killed one of his cows and a buffalo. He recently slaughtered the family's remaining four chickens, reasoning that they would freeze to death anyway.

Two surviving buffalo provide his children with milk, but his 3-year-old son, Fida-ulla, suffers from dysentery and a chest infection, and he fears the others are growing weak, he said.

Atiqullah's tent is one of 18 at the base of the cliff, where villagers fill water jugs and wash cooking pots in a stream whose banks are littered with cow dung and human excrement.

But Atiqullah and other villagers said they were reluctant to leave, in part because they are bringing in the fall harvest of rice, corn and maize, which must be processed by oxen before it can be stored for the winter. They said they might consider moving to a resettlement camp, but only if they were confident the government would provide them with adequate housing and regular employment, assurances they have yet to receive.

Moreover, said Mohammed Shah, 42, "We have the graves of our grandfathers, and our parents, and all our memories. We would not like to leave from this place."

The weather forecast and the U.N. estimate of those without shelter were provided by The Associated Press.