Blog posts from Mansehra and Balakot
Following are excerpts from blog post on Loose Canon made an american engaged in relief and support activites for earthquake victims in Pakistan.
Pakistanis drink a lot of tea. They call it “chai.” They make it by boiling a few cups of milk, adding a few cups of water to the milk when it boils, a few tablespoons of finely ground black tea, a tablespoon (or four) of sugar - and voila. Chai. Sometimes you get tea that’s so sweet you start dancing. But it’s good. Man, it’s good. If you ever visit Pakistan, rest assured you will be offered tea like this at virtually every place you stop. I never quite figured out how they can afford to be so giving.
Our intentions were to head into Muzaffarabad and visit a small village near the NWFP / Kashmiri border to distribute plywood, aluminum sheet-metal, and sandbags. But we were turned back just east of Muzaffarabad by the Pakistani Army. We sat for an hour in their camp listening to stories of massive landslides - and Americans who had died trying to get into Kashmir. They don’t want us getting too comfortable in that part of their country. And who can blame them? The white man doesn’t have a very good track record, if you think about it. That’s no big secret. India wants to take it too. But we just want to help.
Muzaffarabad is an amazing city. They tell us that over 35,000 people died in and around town. I can believe it. They are still pulling bodies from the rubble. Sometimes, when the wind changes, you can smell the decay. It is a sweet, and unmistakable smell.
There are “new” hills where the earth rose 10-20 feet beneath villages and threw trees and structures into the air. You can clearly see places in the side of the mountain north of town that look like they’ve been mined - or blown apart by explosions. Piles of debris 1,000 feet high are stacked against the gray rock-face on the valley floor. A boy tells us that the whole side of the mountain came down, that the earth shook for 15 minutes. His father, he says, told him it was the end of time.
and an interesting observation on Azaan:
When the azaan (call to prayer) comes, just before dawn, the first notes the muezzin sings ring out loud: “Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar…” I calculate the tones in my mind, imagining them as succinct notes on a piano. There are three of them, beginning around middle “C” on the keyboard - rolling up to “E” and back down - just those three notes. The music is not hurried and not too slow. There is a cadence there, but I am sure I cannot pick it out. Further down the valley, I hear four or five other azaans begin at different mosques. The bazaar is empty, but the calls echo there, off the walls, everything blending into one call to prayer, into an ultra-dissonant, extremely handsome harmony.
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