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.
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.
posted by Shane Knudsen | 12:02 PM
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