Swat Relief Drive Day 2 Update

Day two in Mardan was seriously very adventurous. We started off around 10am, taking the Motorway to Mardan, we first hooked up with our two trucks from Lahore and keeping them in tow we were frantic to find a location to offload the good and repack them our planned bags.

Calling up many go’s we first landed at the offices of a highly recommended NGO’s known as Khwandakho, where we met their team. The Khwandakho team was very helpful but was already engaged in various relief efforts across the province in conjunction with Omar Asghar Foundation – Sangi. Since we were actually looking for someplace to offload our relief goods and repack them it was not possible at Khwankho

The general trend of the IDP settlement is that around 10% are in official camps and these are probably the only ones being relatively looked after and fed on a regular basis, but the most touching situation was those IDP’s housed in remote villages and schools practically unknown and neglected from the mainstream donors, quite many are registered, carrying around the Social network card but have to walk miles to official centers to get [quote often not] aid for their family. It is these unknown centers where relief actually needs to be diverted. It has also been my own personal commitment to go the extra mile and tap these unattended areas.

After moving from KhwandaKho we drove towards Takhti Bhai where along the way I actually perceived the gravity of the settlements in the province, all along the entire stretch of the Swabi road were refugees sitting on the roads residing in makeshift tents / pieces of cloths, barely hidden from privacy of the millions gazing along on the main highway. All along the way I merely could not worrying at how big of a disaster we had right on our hands. These could not even be closely called ‘living conditions’ it was by far the worst curse for any human being to string a few ‘chaddars’ and put your bunk practically right in the middle of Swabi road.

In the midst of such shocking sights we were being hotly tailed by two truck drivers who were adamant to offload their goods even threatened us to do it right in the middle of the road. Luckily we bumped in to a fellow dentist Dr. Maqbool Shah who immediately offered the use of the promises of the local tehsil hospital called Gaanji Hospital. Which was for me a godsend. Having found this location immediately lifted a ton off burden off our shoulders and armed with a helpful hospital staff and later a team from Inam’s village offload the two trucks in an organized fashion.

While the villagers were busy unloading and packing, we were treated to a delicious home cooked meal by Dr. Maqbool Shah. After which we departed to tour the area and visit camps in the area.

We first reached Jalali Camp site which was a massive 1026 tents housing 7000 people. A well organized setup but conditions were bad and a little disorganized, while taking a tour we were to witness the ransacking of a relief good trucks, the finesse with which the IDP’s pulled this raid impressed us while at the same time left each one of us stunned as to what actually happened. The dexterity and swiftness with which the IDP’s would scale the 30-40 foot side of the truck in barely 2-3 jumps was unimaginably impressive, they catapulted the top edge landing inside within the blink of an eye picking one juicy hamper and toss it to a friends outside, this continued for a good 10 minutes until the ‘rocket’ [pathans refer to this bedford truck as rocket] was dry and empty. Once the mess cleared and the empty truck rambled down the street a few IDP’s jump into the bushes in the back and out came another stash of goods which were actually thrown their deliberately from a few clever IDP’s as their own game plan to stock up and pile the loot.

Having watched one of the infamous looting we worried for our own fate the next day. We proceeded to rendezvous with another set of remote villagers in Parkharo Deri some 5 km off the main highway and met a town nazim [PPP] who complained that the local MNA and MPA were deliberately ignoring his region and quite possibly starving his people as the last tranche of aid for the 400+ families was delivered four days ago and that too was only 19 bags of goods equivalent to aid for 5 days for only 19 families. The suffering here was tender and dire, we committed to these people relief for 300 families to be disbursed on Saturday as per the registered list of refugees only.

Having roughly allocated our set of 800 bags we headed back to Takhti Bhai where our team of volunteers had bagged and packed about 300 hampers, which we hopefully will distribute in the following quantities. Bagheecha Deri will receive 150 hampers, Tahkti Bhai will receive ~200 hampers and Parkharo Deri will receive 300 hampers. The rest we propose to pass out to those stranded roadside refugees along Swabi road. Hoping that we can maintain enough pace in our truck so as not be engulfed by any mob will quickly handing the refugees some relief goods.

Last but not the least, I was carrying some funds from the main fund and have proposed to do some Sadka Jaria for all our contributors. We have located locations in an empty hospital [housing refugees right now] to put three water coolers on various floors of the building in Takhti Bhai, another three water cooler shall be setup in three schools in Bagheecha Deri as well. The exact plans will be finalized tomorrow

Our third day starts early tomorrow, all I can say this trip has for me alone been tremendously emotionally satisfying, I just hope I can ensure justice tot he funds that I had been entrusted with.