4 November 2005
Quake relief makes Ramadan 'most meaningful' for Muslim aid
worker
By Anto Akkara
NEW DELHI (CNS) -- A Muslim who works for Catholic Relief Services
said responding to the Pakistani earthquake emergency made the
previous month "the most meaningful Ramadan fast in my life."
"This (Ramadan) is a holy month, and it was a blessing to get an
opportunity to do so much good action in this period," said Gul
Wali Khan, a Muslim and emergency coordinator for CRS, the U.S.
bishops' international relief and development agency. Khan, who has
worked for CRS for a decade, spoke in a telephone interview from
his home in Peshawar, capital of the North-West Frontier Province,
Nov. 3.
Khan left his home within hours of the magnitude 7.6 earthquake
Oct. 8 and returned Nov. 3 to celebrate Eid-al-Fitr, the most
important Islamic festival.
"Jokingly, we used to say, 'We have two fasts these days,'" said
Khan, who coordinates the work of the 150 staff and energetic young
volunteers -- most of them Muslims -- drawn from Catholic Relief
Services' six local partners.
Apart from the regular Ramadan fast from dawn to dusk, even without
water, Khan said the "second fast" consisted of hiking through the
mountains carrying relief material to remote villages.
"By the time we reached the villages, we would be very tired. But
when we saw the joy in the faces of these people, we felt so happy
and satisfied. Then, we felt all the trouble we had taken was worth
it," said Khan.
When the CRS volunteers took tents to homeless people in the
mountains, he said, the villagers would "rush forward and embrace
us with tears of joy. That was an unforgettable experience."
At the end of the day, the relief workers would often break the
fast in their vans because they would be far from the base camps at
Mansehra or Besham Qala.
"But none complained about this routine. Everyone was happy and
satisfied that we could do some real good work during (Ramadan)
fast," Khan said.
The earthquake was centered in Kashmir, a disputed territory shared
by India and Pakistan, and more than 73,000 people died in
Pakistan. Khan said CRS relief teams, like others, had been leaving
the base camps at sunrise to head to the remote villages on empty
stomachs due to the Ramadan fast.
After traversing the rugged rocky roads, the volunteers hiked two
to three hours daily to reach remote villages and assess their
needs before giving them relief coupons to collect the relief
material the next day.
By the next morning, volunteers at the CRS base camps would have
loaded small trucks with the tents, woolen quilts and kitchen
utensils. The trucks traveled as far as they could on the roads,
then villagers would come collect supplies or, if the distance was
too far, CRS volunteers would carry the materials close to the
village.
Although CRS workers explored the possibility of using donkeys and
mules to carry the relief materials to the mountain villages, Khan
said the animals could not carry the material up the rocky
terrain.
"But time is running out for us," he said. "Winter is coming fast,
and there will be two to five feet of snow in these areas" by
mid-November, Khan said.
"If they do not receive enough shelter material before that, it
will become another disaster," said Khan, noting the area could get
sub-zero temperatures.
Khan also said medical aid was needed in the remote villages.
He said that in early November, a CRS team reached one village that
no relief workers had visited. With the villagers unable to carry
the injured on their shoulders down the mountains to the nearest
road, some of those injured had developed severe infections.
He also said that in such villages there were an "unusually high"
number of people with fevers, coughs and dysentery due to water
contamination and exposure to cold due to lack of shelter.
Without adequate protection from cold, Khan said, "even these
common diseases could be deadly" for the hundreds of such remote
villages once snowfall starts.
