NZAC PAKISTAN EARTHQUAKE APPEAL - Wellington Section Donation

At the November 2005 CCM the NZAC agreed to set up a fund to help mountaineering communities in Pakistan who are affected by the recent earthquakes. Since the meeting, Judy Reid, NZAC President, has been in touch with Bob McKerrow, an NZAC member who is coordinating relief work in Pakistan, and the attached extract from his diary shows just how bad the situation is there.

An appeal has also received a letter from the Pakistan Alpine Club

The Wellington Section is donating the door takings from the November and December 2005 Section Nights towards this appeal, all funds will be coordinated through the National Office. If you would like to make a donation please do so at the door in December or through the Section or National Office.

NZAC Wellington Committee

From Bob McKerrow's diary -

"Here is a small note from my diary on 22 Oct which will give you a feel of the devastation.

Entered Balakot Valley. Saw landslide scars on the steep valley walls. Road blocked by landslide triggered by the 8 a.m. aftershock

It is the valley of death.

I'm in the middle of Balakot. The whole city is flattened. Three story building crushed like an elephant stepping on a beer can. Cracks you could trap you foot in, splinter across the road. Standing on a school building that 1200 children were in. 500 escaped. 700 decomposing bodies join thousands of others and the stench of death is pungent. People wear face masks. An old man with a hena-dyed beard tightly holds a red handkerchief over his nose and mouth to keep out the smell.

Children sit lifelessly under the sky. I spoke to one man who said he was the only survivor out of a family of five. Other men chimed in saying, " many people here are the only survivor from their families." Children are orphaned. Many people are still digging in collapsed building know that if the are lucky enough, they will find the body of love ones. No one can be alive now. Virtually every building in the valley has been flattened. Occasional you come across a one story building looking cracked, but in tact. Then you realize it is the top floor of a 3 or 4 storied building, sitting at street level. It is eerie. I look to the hills or better, mountainsides, and they are littered with houses that have toppled from their perches. Before they were so beautiful, now dangerous as the slides of rock and mud have engulfed villages and blocked roads, tracks and river valleys.

Visited Spanish Red Cross Emergency health ERU, PRCS/Malaysian Red Cross clinic, then up the hill to where the Swedes and the Austrians are setting up a mass-water unit. The work they are doing is impressive. But like me, had difficulty breathing in the stench of death."