By Andrew Graham, CARE Canada
BHUJ, Gujarat, India (February 19,
2001) -- As far as needs go, these two are basic: shelter and access
to a doctor. And while both are taken for granted by most of us, they are
scarce luxuries in earthquake-ravaged Gujarat. It has been three weeks
since, just before 9 a.m. in the morning, the ground shook violently in
this western Indian state. At a stroke, tens of thousands of Gujaratis
were dead, hundreds of thousands more homeless.
At 7.9 on the Richter scale, the quake had the power of a 30-megaton nuclear explosion. It rumbled with such force that whole towns were reduced to rubble, adults and children alike dying by the score as bricks and concrete crashed down upon them. In Kudajampar, an agricultural village in Gujarat's hinterlands a short distance from the quake's epicenter, not a single building was left standing in a community of 332 families.
In many ways, towns like Kudajampar are lucky. Striking in the morning rather than, say, in the middle of the night, the quake caught many outside of their homes. The wild card, though, was the date of the disaster: January 26, Republic Day. In Kudajampar, parents had assembled around the two-room schoolhouse for a flag-raising ceremony as the children sat patiently at their desks inside, awaiting the appointed hour. The quake struck first. As parents stood helplessly outside, the school collapsed in front of them, killing 15 children.
Yet there is little time for mourning in Kudajampar. Gujarat in February is desert-like in two respects. First, it is an arid place, barren save for the prickly mimosa bush. The crops the villagers grow -- millet and pulses now, wheat after the monsoons -- need the coaxing of daily irrigation if they are to survive. With the electricity to the pumps cut, the crops are withering in the fields. In better times, the average farming family in the village made 2,000 rupees a month, about $43, just enough to scrape by. If this harvest is lost, the village will need food aid for a year.
Gujarat this time of year is also desert-like in climate; the days are sweltering and the nights frigid, the temperature often dipping to a few degrees shy of freezing. With shelter, such conditions are challenging. Without it, they are dangerous. Combine this with a lack of access to medical facilities and the situation is ripe for more suffering.
Early on in the crisis, CARE identified Kudajampar as a village in desperate need of help. Its isolation meant it had been missed by other relief agencies and sanitation was lacking. While distributing basic relief supplies such as blankets and lanterns to the residents, CARE staff approached the village's elected council and offered to set up an emergency medical camp to care for Kudajampar and the surrounding hamlets. But wary of fostering dependence and stretched for resources, the CARE workers adopted a participatory approach. If there was to be a medical camp, the village would have to help with its operation. Later the same day, the villagers agreed, pooling the fuel from the tractors to allow one of their trucks to reach CARE's staging area near Bachau, an hour away, and return. By evening, the camp was setup and CARE doctors were tending to the injured. Having transported the material themselves, the villagers would from then on provide three volunteers per day to aid the busy medical staff. Dr. Noel
D'Souza, a doctor from the Indian state of Goa, is part of the hardworking team. He is as friendly as he is fastidious, and exudes competence. Ask him about the relationship that CARE has built with the village and he beams, leafing through the detailed notes he has kept looking for his favorite stories.
Dr. D'Souza speaks of Ranjit Bhai, a 32-year-old man from Alra village about 12 miles away, who came to Kudajampar to see how his relatives had fared. Hearing about the clinic, he passed by to laud the doctor and his team. "When sukki (roughly 'rich') people like you have spent time with us in the wilderness, you do not give us time to feel sorrow. Because of the earthquake, we are to know of the love of all the people of India and even from outside India. We have nothing to be sad about, we are happy."
This last sentence sounded incredible. Surrounded by devastated lives, it was difficult to fathom how anyone could be content. Yet walking around Kudajampar a few days later, I understood what Bhai meant. Dr. D'Souza explained that rural Indians are used to the capriciousness of nature's vicissitudes. Crops fail, people die, the earth can tremble -- these are tragic events, but life goes on. It is not so much that life is less precious here, but rather that death is more common.
With the health clinic treating more than 80 people per day and another mobile clinic roving around the surrounding area, much good is being done. But Dr. D'Souza says that more and more of the cases he treats are indirect, rather than direct victims of the quake. Exposure and diseases caused by a lack of hygiene -- these are the problems becoming more and more common. What the villagers needed was some form of shelter from the elements. Luckily, this is what CARE brought them next.
CARE signed an agreement with the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) to rebuild the houses of 10,000 families. As an interim measure, trucks brimming with tents barreled down the single-lane road to the village. The large, rectangular shelters, a gift of the Canadian government, are made of heavy canvas, and each is designed to house six to 10 people. Family names were read out and all 332 tents were distributed within two hours. As we drove away, many were already up. With a little luck, each would last a year, maybe more, though the construction of permanent homes is to start sooner.
No amount of help can bring back Kudajampar's homes, nor the children and adults it lost two weeks ago. But there is no doubt that CARE's work is essential if the villagers are to rebuild their lives. Shelter and access to a doctor are, after all, needs we all share.