Khushnaz and her family are still living in tent one year on
Monday, 2 October 2006
Khushnaz Mehmood, eight years old, beams shyly, as she tells us that living in a tent is really not too bad. With her sister Marie, ten, she welcomes us into their family’s tent which is in the middle of what was once Muzaffarabad's most beautiful park, where families used to walk and children played. Now, nearly one year after the earthquake it is still crammed with tents in which live extended families of up to 16 people in a very confined space.
Inside the Medmood tent, it's stiflingly hot but the little girls are sitting diligently doing their homework, writing down English words in beautifully neat handwriting, while their parents are at Muzaffarabad’s main hospital looking after their brother who was badly injured in the earthquake.
"It would be better if we had a fan," they say, adding they hope that we’re not too hot. The softly spoken girls sit close together and shyly tell us how they go to school and do homework every day in the camp just as they used to do before the earthquake happened. But here any sense of normality ends. Despite their age, most days the girls fend for themselves with the occasional intervention of an aunt.
Nearly a year ago, the girls were sitting at their desks in their school when they heard the terrible sound of the earthquake and felt the ground shake. "We thought it must be an evil spirit," says Kushnaz. The girls ran out of the classroom, prompted by their teacher, so that mercifully their lives were saved and they escaped with barely a bruise. Their brother, four year-old Aliya was not so lucky.
His teacher told the class that earthquakes often happened in the area and that they should stay seated at their desks. With the result that only ten children out of 500 children survived. Aliya recalls how the teacher who gave such bad advice was, herself, killed outright by a falling pillar.
Khushnaz and Marie say they will never forget the children and adults outside their school crying and trying to find each other amidst collapsing walls and falling rubble. At home, their mother and little sister, Rashendra, narrowly escaped death as their house collapsed on them as their mother sat bathing her child.
As soon as their mother realised that they had escaped injury she went to her son's school to discover that he was one of the very few survivors. "She thanked Allah that he had saved our brother," says Khushnaz. "But his arm was badly fractured and his leg severely twisted so now he is still in Muzaffarabad's main hospital.
"We miss our home and we miss our favourite uncle who was killed in the earthquake," say Marie and Kushsnaz. Then, with the indomitable survival instinct of children, they add "But we're OK here. We collect water in the morning; we go to school and we help our parents by cooking for them when they return from the hospital. We can cook rice and chicken. Perhaps you would like to eat with us too?"
