Wings of a Bird

Leaving Home Means Living, Quake Survivors Are Told - N.Y. Times [free but registration required]
... There was no question in Shah Jahan's mind that he would have to go. He and his nephew, Hazrat Ghulam Shah, both security guards in Karachi, had rushed back home after the earthquake struck. What they saw that first day told them they could not stay. Never had his family deserted their ancestral land like this. But with the aftershocks going on and on, he said, they could not rebuild their homes before the snow comes. Even the corn would be left to their tenants to cut and store. "The earthquake isn't going away," he said, referring to the aftershocks.
...
Up in Gantar, opinions were mixed and vexed on the subject of moving. Some said they simply would not make it through the winter without a roof over their heads, and there were still not enough tents to go around. Others were anxious about what would become of their cattle and cornfields. Still others worried about how life in a densely packed camp for displaced people would violate the taboos of their closed and deeply conservative Pashtun culture.
Inayat ul-Huq, for one, feared that the women of his family would be exposed to strangers in camp. "Other people will hear their voices," is how he put it.
And so, he resolved to keep his wife, his year-old daughter and the rest of his extended family here for the winter. ...

Zimbabwe migrant: A lecturer describes climbing border fences to find illegal work - BBC News
... I share a room with four others, all Zimbabweans. They are not professionals and take whatever work they can get.
Unfortunately they, like a lot of other Zimbabweans, are subjected to harassment by Botswana citizens.
Often they will work for almost a month. Then just before they are due to be paid someone arrives to check their work permit papers. As they don't have the right papers they then get deported. ...

Photo journal: A Sierra Leone woman's struggle after rebels cut off her hand - BBC News
During Sierra Leone's decade-long civil war, rebels developed the horrific tactic of chopping off the hands or legs of civilians as a way of sowing terror in the population. ...
They put my left hand on a table and chopped it off with a machete. I begged for mercy and asked them to think of God. They told me to point to God with my right hand and they tried to chop that off, too. They tried three times but could not cut it off. But I cannot use three fingers on my right hand. ...
I was in agony - I thought I would die. I went to hospital but all the doctors had run away.
The city was full of corpses.
My left hand was hanging on by the skin and started to rot. ...
I am not too interested in punishing those who cut my hand off but I want my children to be taken care of.
The former rebel fighters are being well looked after, with skills training and free education for their children.
The Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission said we amputees should get a pension but we have seen nothing, although a Norwegian charity built this house for me and my family. ...
Sometimes when my children get into an argument at school, people say to them: "Your mother is a half-person." It is really upsetting....
I work with the War Affected Amputees Association ... Sometimes, I travel ... around the country meeting other amputees and trying to campaign for our rights.

Havana 'waist-deep' in storm waters - BBC News
... Her apartment was once the cellar of the original house. It has no bathroom. And it is below sea level.
Josefa turned down the option of going to the nearby Hispano-America cultural centre, just a few doors down the road.
It was the most solid building on the Malecon and was being used as a government shelter.
"I don't like the atmosphere there and I want to be with my things", she explains.
Hours later she received what she says was the biggest shock of her life. The sole window in her home smashed.
Sea water started pouring in.
She and her family had only a few minutes to grab everything they could, and get out. ...

Essays by a Liver Transplant Patient - Seattle Times
Jack Slater, a Seattle high-school teacher and former actor, received a liver transplant Sept. 21, 2004, at University of Washington Medical Center. Or, as Slater would say, he was "gifted" with a liver. He and his wife, Deborah Swets, know nothing of the donor. They only know that without a transplant, Slater, 58, would have died. He was diagnosed in 1997 with end-stage liver disease, the result of hepatitis C, and had spent almost two years on the transplant waiting list. Slater wrote of his battle with illness in "Life on the Waiting List," a series of intimate and often irreverent essays for The Seattle Times.
Latest installment

Curse of lady luck - MSNBC
Downsides to winning millions in lottery
... “There's a great American myth that money is great and more is better. The truth is a windfall can cause as many problems as it can solve,” says Susan Bradley, a financial planner who often works with lottery winners. “A big lottery win usually starts off with a lot of extreme behavior.” ...
Since Jack Whittaker's $113 million payout in 2002, he's been charged with assault and drunken driving. He lost his marriage and even his 17-year-old granddaughter, Brandi. The teen disappeared last year after reports of drug use and was later found dead. ...
***
Related article: Sometimes winners are the real losers
58-year-old Jack Whitaker, who won nearly $315 million in 2002 has become the poster child for how not to handle a stroke of what should be good luck. He has had hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash stolen from his vehicles, house and office, including over $500,000 after he passed out in a strip bar. He pleaded no contest to assaulting a bar manager, and had to surrender his driver's license and undergo substance-abuse counseling after being arrested for drunk driving for a second time. The most disturbing — last year his 17-year-old granddaughter was found dead of a drug overdose underneath an abandoned van.
Another Texas lottery winner, Billie Bob Harrell, Jr. committed suicide less than two years after winning 31 million dollars in 1997. One of the reasons? Everyone — family, friends and strangers -- had been hitting him up for money.
Minnesota lottery winner Victoria A. Zell crashed her SUV into a truck while driving drunk, killing one passenger and paralyzing another. She was then arrested a few months later for possessing 0.7 grams of methamphetamine.
A study three years ago found that one third of lottery winners eventually went bankrupt. One third! I know we all like to believe we would not be one of "them" that we would handle it better. I buy a ticket on occasion and like to think that if I won, I’d quit my job and live happily somewhere else. I did win bingo once when I was a kid and now that I think about it, I don't know what happened to that money.
But coming back to the point, when you don't win, don't despair. You might be better for it.

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Grandmothers Arrested at Iraq War Protest - A.P.
[photo caption] Betty Brassell, 75, is helped into a police wagon after her arrest during an anti-Iraq war rally in Times Square, New York. Brassell was among 17 members of Grandmothers For Peace arrested when they attempted to enter the U.S. Armed Forces Recruiting Station and enlist in place of soldiers currently deployed in Iraq.

Quake Widens Rift in Families Across Kashmir - N.Y. Times [free registration required]
[This is an excellent article to read to learn about the effects of the long war, as well as the earthquake; here are a few excerpts:]
So great was the earth's fury on Oct. 8, Hakim Ali Khan said, pointing up above this village, that even the mountains cracked. Three waterfalls were born. Huge boulders were dislodged from the Himalayas, sending cattle to their deaths in the ravines. Every house crumbled, leaving at least 300 dead and an immeasurable grief.
No strangers to loss, the people here in Kamal Kote, a cluster of villages pressed against the disputed Kashmir frontier, have survived three wars in the last half-century. They were shelled from across the cease-fire line, when the two countries nearly went to war a fourth time, in late 2001. Kamal Kote's men were hounded, beaten and killed by Indian soldiers fighting a guerrilla war that began in the late 1980's, and in droves, they crossed over into Muzaffarabad, the capital of the Pakistan-controlled part of Kashmir. The line has divided Kashmiri families for 50 years.
...
The earthquake does not seem to have entirely crushed the legacy of mistrust. Kashmiris on either side still have no way to communicate with their relatives across the line. The one connection across the province - a bus service begun six months ago ... has been indefinitely postponed. The so-called Peace Bridge that connects the divided province is itself badly damaged.
...
"There is definitely a lot of sorrow," [Mr. Bucch] said. "I don't have any words."
His daughter, Samra, in her mid-20's, who lay trapped in the rubble next to her lifeless mother, was pulled out alive after four hours. The body of his wife, Sabia, was extracted a day later. Her body showed no injuries. The family consoles itself by saying she died of a heart attack.
Mr. Bucch refused to surrender to grief. He had overcome calamity before.
"Things get better each time," he said. "We work hard and things get better." ...

Earthquake helicopter 'heroes' - BBC News
... Particularly problematic for the choppers was to drop relief supplies at villages - tiny settlements really, often not larger than a dozen houses - close to mountain tops.
These areas have traditionally been served - in severe weather conditions for example - by the army's animal transport units (ATUs) made up of mules.
The mules are amazing animals. Each one of them is trained to carry particular kinds of supplies.
Those trained in carrying ammunition will not carry guns and the ones trained to carry clothes will not transport food - each of these mules is a specialist.
And they can find their destination without human assistance.
...
[A helicopter pilot] says one of the trickiest problems he has faced in relief and rescue work so far is airdropping supplies.
The hastily put together relief packages in the initial days could weigh in excess of 40 kilos.
"Can you believe that old men, women and children would run directly under the choppers, trying to catch the drops," he says.
"From a height of 20 to 25 metres, they would have been crushed under their weight."
...
"Some of the slopes are so steep - especially where levelled clearings have been swept down to the valley by the quake - that most of our airdrops just roll down to the river below," says one pilot.
"We don't want to hover too close to the survivors either, as the rotors would blow away whatever little shelter they are left with." ...

A doctor's testimony of African migrants' suffering in Morocco - BBC News
The typical patient is a person who has tried to jump the fence into Melilla, and is wounded and maybe traumatised.
For example, the last man I treated was 24 years old, from Mali (the majority of them come from Mali, Senegal and Cameroon, or Nigeria). This man had a very bad head wound, after a Moroccan soldier had hit him in the head.
It was an open wound, and when I arrived in the forest it was eight hours after he'd been injured, and he was bleeding badly. He lost consciousness, and was very traumatised.
...
The immigrants won't go to hospital because the police are around - they prefer to stay in the forest, hidden from the security services.

Occasionally we do take patients to hospital, and the staff there always take them in, because we only take the most serious cases. We've never been refused, but they do it reluctantly.
We have to supervise their treatment, because sometimes the hospital refuses to treat the patients in the same way as the Moroccan patients.
...
And those who arrive at the border are only 10% of those who set out. Many die on the way.

Feeding the survivors during Ramadan - BBC News
... Despite the adversity he faced, Mandra Hussein remained a very pious man.
The earthquake may have measured 7.6 on the Richter scale but it had not shaken his faith.
"Our village may have been destroyed but I give thanks to Allah," he told me, "for making the earthquake happen in the daylight hours, so that many people were out of their houses.
"Allah ensured that many of us survived."
...
In fact, many of the earthquake victims are observing Ramadan.
Under their makeshift tents, they dutifully wait for the sun to go over the horizon before tucking into bread, dates and whatever else the aid trucks have brought in.
I asked many people in Bagh why the earthquake had happened and time and again I was told it was Allah's will. "He's punishing us for our misdeeds," they said.
"But why would Allah kill children?" I asked.
"To teach us a lesson," one mullah told me, "that we may learn that we need to live better lives."

Chemical attack: The forgotten victims of the 8-year war between Iran & Iraq - BBC News
[I'd recommend reading the whole article - here's an initial excerpt:]
Each plane dropped four bombs, weighing 250kg each. The smoke was yellow, green, red, black. One man said it was like a rainbow, another said it was as if the sky was covered in plastic clingfilm.
The birds started dropping out of the trees and then the people fell.
Two hundred and seventy five died that morning in a place of worship - many of them women and children.
Some of those who survived now believe it would have been better to have perished instantly.
Like 19-year-old Hedieh. Her name means "a gift", but now she is a terrible burden to her family.
She has to spend four hours a day attached to an oxygen cylinder. It is expensive and needs refilling every week in the nearest town, three hours drive away.
Hedieh would like to go to university, but that is out of the question.
The most she can do is help her mother shell the walnuts which are now in season. "I am waiting to die," she says.
"Every day I get steadily worse and the doctors cannot do anything."
Her eyesight, her skin, her breathing have all been affected. ...

Quake victims' plea: "We need shelter" - L.A. Times
... As soon as the crude lean-to was erected, Noman Shahid, 12, ducked inside and turned sad brown eyes, a runny nose and chattering teeth in silent appeal to Butt, lord of the newest manor. Perhaps the stranger would offer refuge to his family.
"We have no place to sleep except in the open," Noman said, shivering in the thin blue shirt of a school uniform that is his only clothing. The boy explained that his father and a brother died in the Oct. 8 earthquake, his mother was injured, and he and his three surviving siblings were too young to compete with the desperate men fighting for the occasional tent tossed from the back of an aid truck.
A week after the devastating 7.6-magnitude temblor that killed at least 38,000 people, tents are all that stand between quake victims dying of exposure or surviving the next week, never mind the looming Himalayan winter.
With proper tents in shockingly short supply in Muzaffarabad, a frantic building boom has beset this pulverized city, with the displaced scavenging corrugated metal sheets from the ubiquitous rubble to put roofs over their heads. Bedclothes, curtains and carpets hang from the crumpled metal, rippling in the wind but keeping most of the rain out.
In one pieced-together shelter, Abdul Rashid lamented the chaos and confusion that afflict the delivery of relief supplies. Aid workers fearful of being mobbed have taken to hurling their offerings from the back of moving flatbeds and pickups, sometimes lobbing the goods over the cinderblock walls of the soccer field, inciting a panicked scramble.
...

3 inmates stay put after jail destroyed - AP
When a massive earthquake collapsed the prison, guards fled along with more than 100 prisoners. But three inmates chose to stay.
Now living in a makeshift hut, they are waiting to be put back behind bars to finish their sentences in murder cases.
"Why should I escape when I have only one year left to go?"
...
"I have seen some prisoners doing relief work" [one of the guards said].
...
Ahmad, a soft-spoken man, planned to change his life once free. "Yes, I had a role in killing one person. It all happened over a land dispute," he said. "I seek forgiveness from God for what I have done."
Fayyaz said the authorities should take the three men's honesty into account and commute the rest of their sentences.
The three are demanding nothing. "We are not good people that someone should come to rescue us," Ullah said.

Shortage of Tents and Spread of Infection Plague Relief Efforts After Earthquake - N.Y. Times
... Syed Ali Akbar Shah, 65, a former porter for the Indian Army, stood on the side of a road seeking help on Thursday. After three hours, he had collected a packet of biscuits, a candle and a matchbox, amounting to small consolation after his house had been destroyed. "Everything was finished in 10 seconds," Mr. Shah, 65, said. "Within seconds we became beggars."
Stories of long waits and inadequate aid could be heard across the region. In Pakistan, at least 71 amputations have been carried out on earthquake victims whose wounds became infected while they waited days for evacuation by helicopter, Pakistani doctors said Friday. Doctors predicted that amputations would continue.
...
"Helicopters have not been to my village," said Abdul Qayyum, who carried his newly paralyzed wife 18 miles with six other men to reach a helipad. "People are forced to live in the open."
...
When aid did come to this area, its distribution resulted in pandemonium. Relief trucks were mobbed from all sides on Thursday in the village of Kamal Kote. One person took away four blankets; others got none.

Cuban boy dies in smuggler tragedy - Guardian
A six-year-old boy drowned when a smugglers' speedboat ferrying illegal Cuban immigrants to the United States capsized off the coast of Florida. ...
"That young man died because smugglers overloaded that boat, drove it carelessly, and it resulted in him losing his life," said Captain Phil Heyl, commander of the Coast Guard's Key West sector.
...
Some enterprising emigrees have attempted the 90-mile crossing of the Florida Straits in vehicles converted to rafts and barges, including a group in a vintage taxicab in June.
...
Cuban exile groups have long campaigned against the US "wet-foot, dry-foot" immigration policy adopted in 1995 which they say encourages smugglers. Cubans who reach dry land are generally allowed to stay while those intercepted at sea are repatriated.

The struggle to treat quake victims - BBC News
... A man is lying in the makeshift clinic with a very nasty injury to his ankle. It looks like it has been crushed and there is a bone showing around the wound. But it looks like it hasn't been treated and is already infected.
...
"People are walking for days literally to come here. This makes their injuries worse sometimes.
"Most of them have multiple fractures. We need specific medical supplies, IV [intravenous] lines, injections, steroids, antibiotics, painkillers," he said.
Young Mohammed Rafik has a cut on his face although that injury seems to be healing up. But he has a cut to his arm which is of greater concern. His uncle has brought him here after walking 20km (12 miles). His wound has become gangrenous. ...

Girl found alive in quake rubble - BBC News
Pakistani rescue workers have pulled an 18-month-old girl alive from rubble six days after South Asia's deadly quake.
The unconscious toddler was revived after being found in Balimang in North-West Frontier Province.
The news came as rescue teams were scaling back operations, fearing no-one else would be found alive. ...

Doctor's diary: 'We need tents' - BBC News
There were two major aftershocks today. I saw the mountain and it looked as if it were about to split into two. An enormous rock was precariously suspended above us.
It could have killed us.
I've seen doctors in tears. They are on the frontline and they are working with people who are dying, people without shelter, sanitation, and they cannot cope with the trauma.
But I have also seen truck upon truck of aid from ordinary Pakistani people. My UN colleagues have told me they have never seen anything like this. It makes me feel proud.
...
There were people dying, being separated from families - a huge mob filled with pain. There were aftershocks, and all people could do was lie down. The casualties were enormous.
In this city alone, buildings, plazas, shopping centres just fell down.
This is a city, what is it like in the villages?
And it took well over a day for any relief to start coming. They were busy in Islamabad not thinking of the thousands of people still trapped in these rural areas.
In the evening it rained and hailed as a huge storm arrived. It was unimaginable. People were out in the cold, terrified, grieving.
There is no shelter, lots of women and children are braving the extreme weather without food and water, becoming infected by pneumonia.
The psychological trauma is difficult to cope with. We try to reassure them but what can we do when these people have nothing?
They have only their injuries. Their houses have been demolished, they have no money, no place to go.

Tale of the last survivor - BBC News
When his French rescuers lifted five-year-old Shameer Shah Jehan free he was naked and silent, his clothes torn off by falling debris.
He had been under the rubble of the Shaheen Foundation School in the devastated Pakistani town of Balakot for 63 hours. ...
In the hours after the earthquake desperate parents clawed at the rubble.
Cries could be heard from within the building - a three-storey structure perched on the hillside above Balakot which had pancaked as the quake struck.
But without heavy lifting equipment, few of the surviving children could be reached.
...
He now lives in a tent improvised from a sheet and bamboo poles a few hundred metres from the school, surrounded by what remains of his family.
Four of his aunts and uncles are dead. His cousin and best friend, Erbab, died beside him in the rubble.
It is estimated that 10,000 bodies lie under the rubble of Balakot. About 90% of buildings were flattened.
...
"That little boy was crushed into a space that fitted him perfectly. The two children on either side were dead. He had his arms around his head and when we pulled him he came out like a cork. None of his limbs had been crushed, otherwise he would have been very hard to extract." ...
[The teacher's] body was covering two children," said Mr Mornat. "The first was dead but the second was alive. We think that she died trying to shield them as the building collapsed."
...
"He said he drank water under there, but it must be a miracle because there was no water there," said his mother.
Shameer did not sleep throughout his experience, he said. Asked what he thought about in the 63 hours he spent under the rubble, he shook his head.
"For three days I wept for my son," said his mother. "When he was found there was no limit to my joy. The French lifted him out so gently."

Killer quake's 'nowhere children' - BBC News
There is nobody to take five-year-old Zafar Khan home when doctors declare him fit to leave the dank and smelly hospital ward that has been his home for the past week.
The medics have very few clues about the family of this wounded boy ... What they do know ... is that Zafar's father died in last Saturday's earthquake which razed Dalanja village in Uri to the ground. They also know that Zafar's mother is nearly blind and largely immobile ...

Fate could not have been crueller to 15-year-old Mumtaz Ahmed and his seven-year-old sister Rubeena, who have been left holding each other. They became orphans when both their parents died of illnesses in a matter of months in the past two years.
The loss of parents meant that Mumtaz, the eldest of six siblings, including a disabled sister, took care of a family of children. He worked as a daily wage labourer and ran the small family farm to make ends meet. At least, the orphaned family had a roof over their heads.
Last week, the quake swallowed their house and left Rubeena severely wounded with a crushed right hand.
Six days after she was airlifted to the hospital, accompanied by Mumtaz, the doctors amputated her right hand after it began rotting.
...
There is some flickering reaffirmation of life in the middle of death in the gloomy hospital wards too. When seven-year-old Mohammed Altaf was taken out of the debris of his family house in Uri and airlifted to the hospital, he was in a coma.
His mother, Taaja, who came with him, was in shock, having lost her 15-day-old daughter in the rubble, and her son sinking fast.
A week later, Altaf has recovered miraculously. He is saluting and grinning at visitors and his mother is happy to take him back to their tent home.

In Ethiopia, burial societies begin to tend to living, too - Boston Globe
When a family buries its dead in this Horn of Africa nation, burial societies, some older than a century, traditionally have organized everything from feeding the mourners to digging the graves.
...
The groups have expanded their services to take care of the living, sending volunteers into homes to feed, bathe and comfort those who are bedridden.
The societies of death are becoming societies of life, too.
...
"It's a great challenge for us," said Endalikhew Assefa, 35, a member of an idir committee in the Janmeda Akabi area of Addis Ababa. "We decided we had to start trying to save lives. Many women here have five, six or seven children. If a mother dies, she leaves so many orphans. That places new burdens on all of us."
Idirs operate on simple financial principles. A household contributes between 50 cents and $1 a month, and that money is pooled to pay for funerals in the community. ...

Migrants' plight forces new look at Africa - AP
When he was a construction worker in Senegal, Lamine Sambou never knew from one day to the next whether there would be food for his wife and two children. So he, like many desperate Africans, set out for Europe.
A year later, a penniless Sambou sweated under a scorching sun after a night at a Dakar stadium. He had made it only as far as Morocco, when he and hundreds of Africans were deported this week.
"I walked through the desert for days with hardly any water or food. ... I slept in a prison cell, though I was not a murderer or a thief" ...
Still, he swore he would try again - "just to give my family a decent living."
Dramatic, mass bids in recent weeks by would-be immigrants storming the fences around Spanish enclaves in Morocco, and Morocco's crackdown in response, have drawn the world's attention to Africans' determination to get to Europe. Many hope it will also draw attention to the problems that force them from their homelands on the world's poorest continent ...
More than half of Senegal's 10 million people live below the $1-a-day poverty line. Unemployment is about 48 percent and is particularly high among the nation's youth.
The country has few resources and an agriculture economy based primarily on peanuts. Nearly two-thirds of its population is illiterate. Hospitals and roads need repair. Vast numbers of people do not have access to adequate shelter, water or sanitation. The misery has been exacerbated by consecutive years of drought and a devastating locust invasion last year.
Senegal has an advantage over other African nations in similar straits - a history of stability on a continent mired by coups and civil wars. Civil strife across Africa undermines attempts to pull it out of poverty and sends millions fleeing.
...
While in Morocco, he had peered into the Spanish enclave, glimpsing street lamps and smooth, clean roads that contrasted sharply with the misery of Senegal.
"I have not seen it on television, but with my own eyes," Sambou said. "I will be part of it one day."