Feryal Ali Gauhar:"In the shadow of the dying year" (Dawn [Karachi, Pakistan] December 31, 2005)

It is quiet here; nothing stirs amidst the ruin and the despair except for the longing of the heart. Ninety days on and the stillness runs through this valley like a river. In the evening the sky is a dark bowl, the earth a fractured promise. Women gather around open fireplaces, stirring the evening's meal with hands which have dug the ground, searching for a life torn at the edges, ripped apart like a slaughtered animal's skin. Children's voices filter through the air; there is the soft balm of laughter, hope amidst so much desolation.

This is Maira, situated at 3500 feet above sea level. People from the upper reaches of the Himalayas have descended to this camp, bringing with them their last remaining assets, their livestock, sick and hungry and desperate for shelter. At night the temperature is well below freezing. There is not enough fuel to burn to thaw frozen limbs. Men search for firewood amongst the trees which have clung to the earth despite the upheaval which has destroyed so much. Starving cattle huddle together for warmth; there are no shelters for these animals and in the face of winter and so much uncertainty, all of life clings together for survival. In the evening the cattle search for shelter, much as their owners seek protection from the elements and from the fear which eats into their resolve to fight this catastrophe.

At the edge of the camp a few open fires light up the dark night. Several women huddle around the dying embers. In their arms they carry sick children, plaintive cries piercing the still night. They are talking to the doctors who take the children in their arms and rock them gently, soothing the pain, easing the heartache. There is a medley of languages here, a symphony of sounds which speaks so many messages at once. This is the field hospital set up by the medical mission from Cuba, that small island which has remained steadfast in an ocean of tyranny. Cuban doctors and nurses have begun to speak a smattering of Urdu; there are volunteers who have come to translate from Pashto or Urdu into Spanish. All that remains hidden in the hearts of those who come to seek help at this hospital does not need words. It is clear, even by the dying light, to see the succor provided to a devastated people by those who have never known the terrain, the homes which sheltered these families, the schools which buried their children, the meadows where these animals pastured. These are men and women who have never known such numbing temperatures, who joked that this year they shall have the additional privilege of witnessing a "White Christmas", the snow already glistening on the peaks surrounding the valley.

The first Cuban medical team was in Pakistan on October 14, six days after the earthquake. Assembled when Hurricane Katrina had struck the United States, the team was not allowed access to American cities, US policy deeming it inappropriate to allow the "enemy" to address medical and humanitarian needs. The Cuban government set up the Henry Reeve International Team of Medical Specialists in Disasters and Epidemics recently. Commemorating Reeve who fought in the American Civil War and later participated in Cuba's First War of Independence in the latter half of the 19th century, dying on the battlefield, the units of this specialized, rapid response team were recently in the remote areas of Guatemala, where massive flooding had caused thousands of deaths and the threat of disease was looming. The same team is deployed currently in Pakistan.

Cuban President Fidel Castro said recently in a televised interview that unlike other countries which sent "equipment, a number of helicopters and a few million dollars", Cuba helped in a discreet way. "You cannot sort out anything with a few million; what is needed are medical personnel to save lives and treat the sick. This is where you can appreciate what a genuine revolution is, the values that it inculcates, the enormous wealth of human capital that we have created." Cuba's expertise in disaster preparedness has been recognized by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the Association of Caribbean States have selected Havana, the Cuban capital, as the headquarters of the Cross Cultural Network for Disaster Risk Reduction to facilitate regional cooperation in disaster management.

Today, more than a thousand Cuban medical personnel, 789 of them trained doctors, are working in remote mountain villages in Pakistan. Of the doctors, 44 per cent are women. By mid-November these doctors had conducted more than 2,000 operations. They have set up 19 field hospitals and work in 12-hour shifts. They are working in crowded refugee camps, treating an exceptionally large number of children suffering from trauma and respiratory as well as water-borne diseases. Often, the doctors and nurses are woken up in the middle of the night by a mother pleading with them to save her only surviving child. Not once has a patient been refused; not once has a mother had to retrace her steps from the hospital empty of hope.

What is it which makes this overseas medical mission steadfast in the face of harsh climactic and geographical conditions? What makes people from the other side of the world give up their families, the comfort of their homes, the certainty of their cultures, to come and work in unfamiliar and sometimes frightening circumstances? Is there something in Fidel Castro's reference to the genuine revolution which has inculcated undying human values? Is there something we, in this blessed, blighted land, need to consider before we begin another year, faltering on a course carved out by simplistic ideology, framed in the comfortable if confining box of myopia? Is there something missing in the vacuous rhetoric of our leadership which insists on its own innate supremacy and the inherent stupidity of those who are led? Can we, for even a fleeting moment, believe that a leadership which has bolstered itself as the right arm of the most brutal regime in the world, that this leadership will have the foresight and the sensitivity to lead entire nations away from what it considers is mass suicide?

In Maira, the current pre-occupation of this leadership with the supposed lemming-like proclivity of the people of Sindh seems to be out of place with the magnitude of the disaster before us. The fact that 28,000 acres of farming land in the NWFP and 15,000 acres of farming land in Kashmir have been devastated, that thousands have lost their lives, that millions have lost their livelihoods and their homes, that an entire generation of youth has been decimated, should prod this leadership into considering for a moment the dangerous course it has set its sights upon. To the ordinary, the manner in which the concerns of the citizens of this country are being addressed is inappropriate and unacceptable. It is certainly not enough to rest on the faded and false laurels of having generated "funding" for the rebuilding of nine districts devastated by a lack of respect for the fragility of the ecosystem and the lack of concern for the holistic well-being of communities. It is not enough to place a timorous hand on the head of an orphaned child, mouthing platitudes about turning disaster into opportunity. For the thousands of families who have not even been able to bury their dead, there is no opportunity in this disaster. The opportunity which leadership lost is precisely the cause for the scale of the devastation being witnessed today not only in our northern areas, but certainly in the rapidly deteriorating Indus delta where the river is a bed of sand, where water is more precious than blood.

What is it that allows for the thickened membrane of myopia to creep over one's sight, obscuring one's vision, obfuscating real issues and trivializing the lives of those one leads? What is that unholy source of inebriation which drives one to begin believing in rhetoric created by spin-doctors who have been in the pay of others but who make us feel as if we were the only Kings to whom they pay obeisance? Why is it that the obvious truth is constantly dismissed as being a product of the dubious domain of thoughtfulness and genuine concern? Why are the dynamics of unbridled population growth and the inequitable distribution of resources not considered as endemic to any understanding of the growing dissonance between consensus and conflict? Why are the linkages between state neglect, political exclusivism, growing disparity and mounting discontent not clear to a junta which has fattened itself on the sale and allotment of real estate beyond the realm of the imagination?

Is this our failing, to not challenge the veracity of the claims being made by this designer-suited dispensation which functions almost entirely on the giving and taking of orders, and does not condone the questioning of the validity, purpose and efficacy of those orders? Is it our failing, too, to bask passively in the pale winter sunlight while conditions for a civil war ripen in at least half of our country? Shall we continue to wallow in the quagmire of decadence while young children arch their backs in the crippling vice of tetanus fever, while others in the impoverished Union Council of Bugra Memon peer over the horizon of the encroaching ocean, seeking some purpose amidst the ruins of what was once arable land and a delta rich with alluvial deposits and dreams of rich marine harvests? How long shall we stand by, watching this parade of tyrants masquerading as benevolent, benign Masters of All they Survey? How long before the malignancy which is inherent in the destruction of civil society consciousness becomes apparent to us? How long before the river of silence which flows through the valley of Maira yields a harvest of death?

It is evening now. Tomorrow I shall return to my other life, taking with me fragments of other lives. As night begins to envelope this valley in its dark embrace, I hear silence falling all around us like a shroud. Only the sound of the river soothes the turmoil inside, only the sad knowledge that we are now incapable of irony, that this land will now host atoms of dust. Here, on our last evening, we look closely at the mountains besieging the clouds, a conquest, a counter-conquest.