IN DECEMBER 2005, The Scotsman published the diaries of Maggie Tookey, an aid worker with the Scottish charity Edinburgh Direct Aid who spent six weeks working in Kashmir among the devastation caused by the Pakistan earthquake. There she detailed the trail of destruction, the vast loss of life and the crucial work that the charity was carrying out to get help to those who needed it most - providing shelter and wood-burning stoves to families whose entire lives had been wiped out in an instant.
The reaction by Scotsman readers was immediate and generous. Money poured in and within ten days EDA had received £15,000, enabling the charity to recruit two extra volunteers and double the number of wood-burning stoves they hoped to send to the are
a. Four months on and the continuing generosity of Scotsman readers has meant a flurry of activity in the region, including the installation of a medical clinic (converted from a huge container that will carry in vital medical supplies) in a remote area, bringing aid to areas inaccessible by road since the earthquake last October. In these, her latest diary entries, Tookey continues her story, and demonstrates how such generosity can mean so much to those who lives continue to be affected by one of the world's worst natural disasters.
'They're so desperate for their high-valley clinic'
JUST come out of the mountains, preparing the site for the clinic. I am just about hanging on here, but totally knackered. Feel like I'm never going to get out of here, there's so much work still to do - suppose that's mostly my own fault for suggesting the clinic idea - it's such a big job, but I guess it will be worth it when we see it slung under a massive helicopter and flown into the mountain site.
I still don't understand how it will lift the 40ft (12 metre) container, weighing nearly ten tons when converted, but the Russian UN pilot seems to be looking forward to the job! The clinic itself will be a great facility for the high valley. At the moment they have to take a 15km (9.3 mile) hike down the mountain to get the most basic medical help. Two more babies died when I was there last weekend and there's a high mortality rate among new mothers who are giving birth under tin sheets for shelter.
The clinic will have a delivery room. It's a HUGE container! I spent the last five days up there preparing the site with the villagers. They had to haul huge pieces of wood from the rubble up the mountain to the site. It was amazing and quite emotional - young and old dragged these things over the terraces - they're so desperate for their clinic.
One night we had to be rescued from our tents by the villagers in a huge storm: the tents were about to be washed over a steep drop. The villagers rushed down to us, knowing what was happening, and dug away to divert the torrent. Everything was soaked, sleeping bags, the lot. Then the villagers went back up to huddle under their flimsy tin-roof shelters. We couldn't get off the mountain because of big landslides. A taxing few days, generally speaking!
I have to go north to Kohistan next week, to deliver aid to an earthquake refugee camp on the Karakorum Highway - a ten-hour drive each way. I am going to overfly the area on Saturday in a helicopter to see what conditions are like. I absolutely hate heli-flying. These Russian ones have a very bad safety record. Two have crashed since last November. The trip is also to assess livestock needs in a very high valley there - around 14,000ft. EDA may provide them with cattle to replace those killed in the poorest families. I'll be here till next year at this rate! I'm off to try and push the clinic conversion on even faster - the Kashmiri rate is slower than mine - not good for the blood pressure.
'We have brought warmth to about 9,000 people'
FINALLY having a few days "R and R" in Islamabad after being in the mountains, and arranging the next phase of EDA activity. Great to get a hot shower and scrape off the dead fleas.
It feels like I've been here a lifetime, but it's only been a month so far. The first phase of our relief effort in the Kotla Valley has ended. We've put 1,500 wood-burning stoves up there, which have brought warmth and cooking facilities to about 9,000 people. The stoves have been a real success story and we have carried out some thorough assessments of the effects they are having on children's health.
Before, they had been using open fires with no chimney inside their shelters, and the cases of chronic lung complaints and eye infections were too numerous to count. Once the stove is installed along with its chimney, it becomes smoke-free and the women and children who spend all their time around the cooking pot are utterly delighted. The extra benefits are that it uses very little wood, burns for hours, and provides a central heating system for the shelter. We actually had one complaint that a shelter was too hot!
A few days ago I received an urgent request for EDA to do a stove distribution to an even more remote valley to the east of Kotla. I went in by road, as no helicopters are assigned to fly any goods in there. The trip was horrendous: the [drive to the] Neelum valley itself from Muzaffarabad is just one long landslide and the road is not much better than a rocky track, carved from the mountain after the earthquake. The hillsides are loose scree with heavy boulders perched among the shattered rock above the road.
It took four hours to cover 22km (13.7miles) up to the village of Kankon. It was a gut-wrenching ride - the road, such as it was, was broken - and the drops off the side were terrifying. Despite the fact that it has two helipads, as far as I could gather no helicopter has flown in with any aid since last November and no NGO has been near the place. Somehow it has been left out of the loop.
It is very high, very beautiful, very poor and very damaged: probably around 90 per cent of the place is destroyed. I spent three hours there - far too long given the fading light and the difficulty of the journey back. I met the women's committee and the male village leaders, and left them to decide whether or not they would like our container and what sort of building they might like it to be. The container is expected to arrive in Kashmir tomorrow.
We got caught in a landslide on the ride back down and had to leave the jeep to help move rocks and scree from the track. I was frightened more would come down on top of us, and worked harder than anyone out of pure fear. How the driver got the jeep over this slide was amazing, but he did and we finally got back to our base at 9pm, three hours after dark. The next day I went back up to the Kotla Valley by road again and got caught for three hours at a large landslide on the Neelum Valley road. Bit tiring!
The next task is to distribute the 12 tons of container goods and then convert the container itself into a mobile clinic. Then we will have it slung under the largest helicopter in the world and drop it in to our remote valley at over 8,000ft - a tricky task and one that the UN is deciding how to tackle. They've never done it before, but it would be a major benefit for the whole valley population of around 8,000 people.
Occasionally I get these crises of confidence, thinking 'Oh God, what am I trying to do here - perhaps the whole idea is untenable and pie in the sky - we're such a small volunteer NGO, surrounded by the big boys like Oxfam and Unicef'. Still, if you don't go for the big things I guess you'll never know whether or not they might have worked.
The last major task will be to equip, with the help of UNICEF, the schools in the highest mountain villages above base camp. If I get it all done before I come home I'll be amazed.
My team is learning fast. It's difficult for anyone out here facing these conditions for the first time, regardless of their potential. We've been unloading up to six helicopters a day, sometimes two at a time on the helipad with rotors going full pelt all the time.
There is still so much to do, it's a bit overwhelming if I stop to think about it, so I try not to.
• If you would like to support EDA's work in Pakistan, send a cheque to Edinburgh Direct Aid, 29 Starbank Road, Edinburgh, EH5 3BY, or telephone 0131-552 1545; for credit card payments go to
www.edinburghdinburghdirectaid.org