Khuda Hafiz Pakistan!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I hope everyone had a great holiday season! We spent a very relaxed and uneventful Islamic Christmas in Islamabad... wasn't much going on here as you can imagine! I was pretty sick up until Christmas day, so since I was feeling better we all went out for a huge dinner, and all woke up the next day with food poisoning of some sort. Mine sort of lingered until a day ago or so, so I've been sick for a good couple weeks... no fun!

As far as the relief work goes, I'm now finished! Yay! It was an amazing experience, very unexpected and worth every moment, and I'm also glad that it's over! Our plans kept changing on a pretty much daily basis. It's impossible to come into an unknown country with ideas of how you want to do things and expect it to come out as you planned and on the schedule you want, and even harder to stay motivated to keep working when you spend most of your time sitting around waiting for other people to get their shit together! So we had to learn early on to go with the flow and adapt as necessary, but we didn't know exactly how far we would end up having to get from our original plan.

We ordered 10,000 sandbags and took them up to Surul and began distributing to the 30 families that were anxiously awaiting them. The week before we brought them up there a couple of NGO's had arrived in Surul and the surrounding villages and began distributing CGI, so each family would be ending up with around 20 sheets, which is a lot. We were happy about this because it meant we could focus on sandbags and stretch our money even further. 3 days later we went around to check up on the progress and not a single family had started building. Several days later another check, and still not a single family! Naturally we were all pretty upset at this, but the general opinion was that because aid had started to arrive from a few different sources they were sitting tight and waiting to see how much they could get before making a move. Once they start building then they look like they've been taken care of, and any new NGO's coming in to scout the area will pass them by.

We decided then to start looking for a new area that had still recieved no aid and would be more appreciative and anxious to start building. We reconnected with a small Pakistani NGO called EHD that had been helping us earlier on to find the sandbags and CGI and negotiate prices, and decided to use them to help us find new villages and also rely on them for the distribution which would make our lives a lot easier and safer. Basically this meant that the rest of the work we needed to do to spend the money we had raised was mostly in Islamabad, ordering the supplies, etc.

We moved on to other villages, but decided to take into account what they were asking for, as opposed to trying to sell them our idea of the sandbag shelters. Most villages were asking for CGI (corrugated galvanized iron - the most expensive part of the shelters we were going to build) to use as roofing, and then they can build whatever kind of structure they want underneath, so we decided it was best to do that, especially considering that the rains and snow would be starting any day now. The other upside of this was that the new villages we were moving into were convinced that they would be getting CGI from someone at some point, so they had already started building frames for their shelters and would be putting the roofs on and completing their shelters within a day or two of us delivering it to them, which motivated us even more to go with that idea and see some results, and not have a repeat of Surul!

Had we been doing this work in the U.S. I could have accomplished everything we needed to do within in a couple of days, but being Pakistan it ended up taking us a couple weeks. We've renamed it 'Insha'allah-stan', which we think sums up our experience. "I'll call you tomorrow, insha'allah." "Your CGI will be ready tomorrow, insha'allah." "The truck will definitely take the CGI up tomorrow, insha'allah." My newest definition of the phrase is that is just means to multiply by 5. If I'd known that earlier it would have saved us a lot of trouble...

On a more positive note for Surul, it just took them some time to get going, but at least 60 families are building sandbag shelters now, so our idea was a good one after all! Joost (one of our group) stayed up in Surul and has been overseeing all of that and spending the money he has raised on providing more sandbags to those that need it.

I'm now in Lahore again, which I really enjoy... more so this time, since the rains have come it's really cleaned the air up, which is my one major complaint here. Lahore is by far the most polluted city I've ever been to, it's absolutely disgusting. Imagine putting your face in front of a vehicle's exhaust pipe and that's about the equivalent of being outside in Lahore, literally. Other than that it's an excellent city full of life and character! We spent New Year's Eve here at our guesthouse... the owner arranged live music and dancing on the roof, so it was a lot of fun, and much different than any other New Year's I've had... mostly because I was sick and in bed, so just enjoyed the music from my hotel room :(

Looking back to when we first arrived here and were wondering what our skill-less selves would actually be able to accomplish it's truly amazing to see how it's all turned out. In the end our group raised over $20,000, and we were able to provide enough shelter to cover 3 villages beyond Surul, probably around 200 families, so we're all extremely happy and excited about that. Pretty much all of our money is now spent, so some of the group is heading with me to India tomorrow, and a couple others stayed behind and will work in a tent village helping out for a little while longer. The rain and snow have now arrived... it's been pretty cold down here, so I can only imagine what it's like up in the mountains. I would love to take one more trip up to the villages and see the results of our work and take more pictures, but I just don't have the energy for it now.

Thank you so much to those that donated to us, we were not at all expecting to get private donations but it allowed us to do so much more than we had planned, so thank you from us and from the people of Kashmir!

I'm pretty excited to get back to India, but I've absolutely loved Pakistan and can't wait to come back and explore it another time, the scenery in the north is supposed to be some of the best in the world, and I've already described the amazing people to you. I'll definitely be back, just not sure when. But for now, the warmth and chaos of India beckons... along with a much larger selection of food, and most importantly, my sister! We'll be heading to the more tropical south of India later this month, so I'll be working my way down to Bombay to meet her in a couple of weeks!

I hope everyone has an amazing year! I can't believe it's already here, I've been away for 9 months now! How did that happen? I could've had a baby by now...

Much love... Wes