One year after Pakistan's devastating earthquake, Graham Usher returns to a village haunted by the past and frightened by the future The Sisters' Home Girls' School in Bamhara rests on a mountain shelf 2,000 metres high. The single classroom is a mesh of wood and iron: the yard is a cemetery. Spread out before the school -- in a cradle of lush green mountains -- is the Balakot Valley of Pakistan's north-west frontier province: the epicentre of the earthquake that, on 8 October 2005, left 73,000 dead, three million displaced and cities like Balakot in pieces. The tremors of that day still disturb Bamhara. In "a crash like doomsday" the village lost 200 of its people and all of its homes. A sense of bereavement is everywhere, relieved only by the excited chant of schoolgirls learning their multiplication tables. "Three times seven is 21, four times seven is 28 ..." The class is being taught by 18-year-old Nisreen, a small, concentrated bundle of determination. She's from Bamhara. She is also "very lucky", she says, and not only because she wasn't home when the earthquake struck. Her family left the village years before, freeing Nisreen to get an education. Supported by a women's organisation in Peshawar, she returned in January, convinced the earthquake was not only a catastrophe but also an opportunity. "Bamhara never had a girls' school. Education was only for men. So we decided to set up one. We didn't wait for the government. We decided to act ourselves," she says. Every day 60 girls from the village act by attending classes, many the age of their teacher. A few want to become tutors themselves. The school is rare light in Bamhara. Balakot had been the village's main urban artery. It was the hub of the valley's thriving tourist industry. Today it is a shell, a metropolis stripped to the bone. The only life is a bazaar that somehow trades amid the ruins, like a cactus growing in the desert. In Bamhara there are not even cacti, laments village councilor Sardar Wali-ur-Rahman. "We had three sources of income," he says. "We were farmers, herdsmen or worked in Balakot. Well, the earthquake took our land, killed our livestock and destroyed our city. In a moment everything we had was gone," he says with a wave of the arm. With his black turban and regal beard, Wali-ur-Rahman is every inch the tribal patriarch. He has four wives, eight sons and seven daughters, one of whom was killed by the quake. But his realm is shrinking, overthrown by changes seismic and social. He is not against the girls' school in the village. He simply can't see the point of it. "It's not really a school," he sniffs. Bamhara is lucky. Because of its nearness to Balakot, it received more aid than remoter mountain hamlets. The main road to Balakot was cleared within a week. The army freighted tents and corrugated-iron roofs ensuring Bamhara's 550 families would have at least some winter shelter. An international NGO gave fodder for the animals. The village survived, despite fears the cold would bring another round of deaths. The mountains too were kind. "The snowfall last year was barely a metre. Usually it's two," says Wali-ur-Rahman. But the aid has been a curse as much as a blessing, say villagers. "It eroded our spirit of self-reliance, created a culture of dependency," says one. As an example he cites how the men of the village were immobilised by government promises of compensation. "We waited seven months to receive $400, which is not enough to rebuild our houses. Had some of us gone to find work, we could have purchased the materials ourselves. But we were afraid we would miss the money. So we waited -- and now we have no houses, no jobs and no money." There is also unrelenting criticism of the government's Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority (ERRA), a largely army-run affair set up to manage the disaster. Aside from delays in compensation, there is anger about what can only be described as official incompetence. "For months we were told we couldn't rebuild our wooden houses -- because they were not earthquake-proof," says Wali-ur-Rahman. "Now we are told we can, with winter barely a month away." Finally, there is bafflement how an operation led by Pakistan's supreme national institution, supported by 100-plus international NGOs and funded to the tune of $6.5 billion cannot repair Bamhara's sole water pipeline to Balakot. "(President General Pervez) Musharraf says ours is an 'owner driven strategy'. Yet we cannot get a glass of clean drinking water," snorts a villager. Junaid Ali Qassim is the elected member or nazim for the Balakot district. He accepts some criticism but insists that villages like Bamhara have yet to grasp the sheer scale of the disaster that befell Pakistan. "Look, one million people were made homeless in the Balakot region alone. Fourteen thousand were killed. Eleven hundred schools were destroyed. I understand why the people of Bamhara are angry. But they tend to see only what's in front of their eyes. I see the big picture." But things could have done better, he admits. "The real problem is everything is top-down. Had we been given the money, we could have repaired the water pipes. But the army contracted the job to a foreign NGO which doesn't know the local conditions." Yet Qassim's solution is hardly any less top-down than the military's. "The masses", he says, "need to be moved" to Bakrial, the "new Balakot" town the government is planning to build some 24 kilometres from the old. "I don't just mean the homeless of Balakot. I mean villages like Bamhara. I know the site is beautiful and there are families who have been here for generations. But the village rests on a landslide. It's has a single road that runs to a city that no longer exists. It's a death trap. It has no future." It is a message that hits on ground as hard as the mountainsides, and one the village is reluctant to accept. For some -- like Nisreen -- the new Bamhara is already a better place than the old: it at least now has a girls' school. For the elders and the men the past is still a safer shore than the frightening fords of the future. And for old and young, men and women, there is still the tenacious belief that there is no home but the mountains, "even when they turn on us", says Wali-ur-Rahman.
