Online Donations

EMM has a website where you may donate with a credit card online. The page is: www.emm.org/donations/index.html
Simply put my name, Shane Knudsen in the "Designate my contribution to:" field in their form. You will get an amount confirmation page next, and you will then be taken to a secure website where you can enter your credit card information.

Thanks again for your support!

Balakot

On the Sunday that we went to Muzaffarabad, we also went to visit the rest of the EMM workers in what remained of the city of Balakot.

We got there just before sundown, but there was just enough light to see the scale of the devastation of Balakot. Apparently, the city sat right on a fault line, and took a lot of damage. Balakot is about the size of Lancaster, and about 3 houses are left. Really.

Last I heard, the government had decided to move the city rather than clear away all the rubble and build again.

We eventually found our friends camped out with the rest of the city residents on the farming terraces at the edge of the city. Each terrace is about wide enough to put up a good sized tent and still have enough room to walk by , but that's about it.

I mostly talked with Benji, the photographer who had been sent to Balakot. We showed each other our photos, and shot the breeze for a while. He took a few of us to one of the few remaining buildings where there was a shop. I bought a Pepsi (which I had to drink there and return the bottle) and some strawberry candies for the kids in Bugna. By the time we were done there, it was time to start the 2 1/2 hour trip back to Bugna.

Muzaffarabad

Muzaffarabad is the capital city of Azad Kashmir. (Azad meaning "free", as in not under the control of India)

Dean and I had the opportunity to go with Mr. Mujtaba and Yasir (the hospital's ambulance driver) to Muzaffarabad on the first Friday that I was in Kashmir. Some of the guys that had been there ahead of us warned us about the trip into town riding in the ambulance. The ambulance has one fixed bench seat in the back that faces backwards, and any extra riders would have to sit in plastic lawn chairs. Apparently, Jay and Steve had to ride in these chairs on their last trip into town. Every time that they went around any sort of serious turn, (which is something like every 60 yards of road coming down the mountain!) one of their chair legs would buckle, and they'd almost take a spill. Fortunately, Dean and I got the bench seat.

Muzaffarabad is a decent sized city, a bit larger than my home town of Lancaster, PA. Like most Pakistani mountain cities, it is situated on steep hills, and dust is everywhere. The main landmark is the confluence of the Jehlem and Neelum rivers. Between the two swift and deep rivers and the mountains all around, it is a beautiful place.

Unfortunately, Muzaffarabad was only 20-30km from the epicenter of the earthquake. It got hit hard, although not all is lost. Most of the government buildings survived, but the university took a lot of damage, and several schools and market places were destroyed completely. You can't look anywhere in the city without seeing heavy damage. A good number of people are camped out in the ruins, and a large encampment has been set up on a sand bar next to the river. The river is fairly low in the winter, but you can see that the river rises about 15ft in the wet season. I'm not sure what they plan on doing with the thousands of people who are camped below the high water line when the rainy season comes.

We didn't have too much time in town, but I did get a chance to take some photos. Mr. Mujtaba needed to stop at the barber shop and get a trim and a shave, so Dean and I tagged along. Dean decided to get a shave while we were there. I, obviously not needing a shave, started taking some photos. The trick was to ask one man who looked fairly curious if I could take his photo.(ok, ask isn't quite right; I don't speak Urdu. I gestured with the camera.) Then, I'd show his photo around, get the rest curious too, and snap a bunch more. By the time Mr. Mujtaba was done, I had photographed just about everyone who came in and out of the shop.

We stopped on the way out, got a few supplies, and then headed back to Bugna. I noticed that Yasir had the ambulance emergency lights flashing as we drove home.

The whole group of us got to spend the next Sunday in Muzaffarabad. We divided up into smaller groups, and spent most of our time in a shopping district down near the Jehlem. We walked down to a hotel a bit further south along the water front, and had a delicious lunch. The hotel was still in operation, but had a ton of damage done to it. For example, the mens' room had a regular door that you would expect to see, or, if you were feeling lazy, you could walk through the nice, big hole in the wall. A crew of about 6 men was at work rebuilding the lobby when we walked in. One wing of the downstairs hall was completely blocked with rubble. We ate on the balcony overlooking the swimming pool and the Jehlem.

Shezad, our driver, was held up with something at Bugna, but he showed up in time to take us to Balakot to visit the rest of the men that EMM had sent to Pakistan.

Going back again.

Barring any unexpected difficulties, it looks as if I'm going to get to go back to Pakistan this year.

The current plan is to send several people back to Bugna some time in October. Men who are going will be working on more sanitary facilities, and helping some of the local families with the rebuilding effort. Women who go will be doing medical work. It seems that there is a shortage of female medical staff in Pakistan.

If you would like to help me raise funds for my return trip to Bugna, Community Mennonite Church of Lancaster will be handling most of my donations. Checks should be made out to CMCL and Shane Pakistan should be noted in the memo. CMCL's address:

CMCL
328 W Orange St.
Lancaster, PA 17603

I'll be looking into electronic donations this week, and I hope to post the information soon.

Thanks to everyone who has offered support!

My second week in Kashmir December 2005

Our second week in Bugna was mostly taken up with working on clearing rubble from nearby houses.

Daryl and Jon had made it clear to Mr. Mujtaba (the HDF director in Bugna) that we would be eager to help some of the neighbors clear out the remains of their houses. Mr. Mujtaba eventually settled on two different houses for us to work on. I'd say that easily 3/4 of the houses in the area were totally flattened by the earthquake. The rest took damage of varying amounts. There was a school nearby that seemed to be undamaged. I think it's the only building to take no damage.

The first house that we worked on was in Satnarra, a neighboring village that took us a good half hour or so to hike to. I'm not too sure how we ended up at this house. There were plenty of totally destroyed houses in between Satnarra and the hospital. My guess is that Mr. Mujtaba and Dr. Sajid put their heads together and decided on a few families that would be most open to westerners coming in and working. Another mitigating factor may be that the two places that we worked on were too isolated to have some of the emergency shelters put up at their houses. The trail to Satnarra was so rugged that we couldn't even get a wheelbarrow over there.

The only thing that had stayed put at this house during the earthquake was the wooden door and door jamb. Everything else had collapsed into a pile of rocks, beams, and dirt. We decided to set the goal of clearing out the two westernmost rooms of the house. It took 8 of us, the homeowner, one of his sons, and a few neighboring kids 4 full days to clear them out. The roof of the house was made of a combination of large beams, brush, and mud. So clearing out a room involved getting rid of the biggest rocks first, loosening a beam (each beam took 6 men to move) digging out some dirt, moving more rocks, digging dirt and so on. Since the trail was so rugged, we ended up only bringing a few shovels and used some old rice bags to haul the dirt away. Eventually, the bottoms broke out of the rice bags, so we had to lay them out flat, put a bit of dirt on them, and wrap it up as best we could to haul the dirt.

Later on in the week, we worked at a different house that was a bit closer to Bugna. There were two houses on the property, one of which was totally flattened, and the other was heavily damaged. We worked there for two days and cleared out most of the flattened house.

The last goal of the week was to get the concrete pad poured for the latrine at the hospital. After several delays, we got to it. (sand wasn't delivered on time the one day, and all the water was gone the other day) After a hard day, we got it done. Rather, we got it 2/3 the way done. The plumbing for the Asian style squat toilet never showed up. Par for the course.

My first week in Kashmir. December 2005

I traveled to Pakistan last year with a group of men from Eastern Mennonite Missions who were sent in response to the October 8, 2005 earthquake. Our aim last year was to be emissaries of peace, provide what help we could, and to offer any comfort that we could to the people affected by the earthquake.

40 men went to Pakistan; 16 of us were sent to a village called Bugna, which is in the Hindu-Kush mountains. In Bugna, we met up with an organization called the Human Development Foundation
We started working on the field hospital that HDF had set up there. Starting out with building "rooms" in the Hospital tent itself. We also built a set of stairs from the parking lot to the hospital tent, and a latrine.

Introduction

Hello everyone,

I'm setting up this blog with the aim of keeping in contact with everyone at home who would like to have information about what I'm doing in Pakistan.