ON THE GROUND: South Asia quake - day six

An earthquake survivor sits at a temporary refugee camp located at a stadium in Muzaffarabad October 13, 2005. REUTERS/LUIS ENRIQUE ASCUI

LONDON (AlertNet)

- As a steady flow of relief supplies rumbled into Pakistan's earthquake zone on Thursday, AlertNet asked aid workers for their latest assessments of the situation on the ground.

Here is a rolling snapshot of their responses, based on telephone interviews. Scroll down to see new comments.

Pregnant women in desperate need of food

Tens of thousands of women in the quake area are pregnant, and urgently need high protein food and medicines, Action Aid said.

"There's a report from the UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) that 40,000 women affected by this tragedy are pregnant," Action Aid's spokesman in Pakistan, Shafqad Munir, said.

"Many of these women need nutrition and medical care which is not available to them. In our consignments we are carrying food that is high in nutrition and protein for them."

The UNFPA has appealed for $3.2 million to meet the needs of pregnant women in the quake zone. It says the physical and psychological shock may increase the number of women needing emergency medical care to prevent maternal or infant death.

Munir said Action Aid was focusing its efforts on villages that were inaccessible by road in the region of Balakott and Bagh.

"The name Bagh means garden. But this garden - this area which used to be so beautiful - has been turned into one of death and destruction," he said.

Action Aid is using small cars and jeeps to take aid deliveries as far as it can into more remote areas of the quake zone. From there doctors and relief workers carrying food and water are walking several miles to villages.

Munir said the high death toll among children was particularly distressing.

"All the kids were at school. Almost all the schools collapsed - that's the biggest tragedy of this. There are a lot of bodies of children lying dead and no one is claiming them."

Children say what they want Save the Children

is helping villages form committees to decide what they need, making sure to include children's views.

"So far our priority has been relief, but now we are looking at things like recreational supplies," said Programme Officer Wasim Bhat, working in Indian-administered Kashmir. He said children had asked for books, cricket bats and toys.

"It could help the normalisation process for some children," he said.

He added that people would soon start worrying about not being able to continue their education, since so many schools had been destroyed. One girl who had lost her father told Save the Children staff her biggest concern was the education of her two younger brothers.

Bhat said Save the Children was focusing on remote areas, to avoid overlapping with other aid efforts. He explained that the Indian border town of Uri could be reached relatively easily: "Other organisations are active there, so we decided to start with the most inaccessible villages that have been left out."

Winter tents were hard to come by in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian-administered Kashmir, but were due to arrive from Delhi at the weekend.

When Save the Children took aid to the village of Shalkot on Wednesday, people from four other villages came to demand help. "We could only tell them that we are doing our best, and that supplies would reach them soon," Bhat said.

Aid workers give own blood International Rescue Committee (IRC)

aid workers arriving in the Pakistani towns of Abbotabad and Mansehra were so shocked by what they found they dontated their own blood.

"IRC staff members were so stunned by the scale of the disaster they paused to donate their own blood for survivors needing transfusions," said IRC's deputy director of programmes in Pakistan, Heng Djin Tik.

IRC's emergency programme adviser in Islamabad, Farmanullah, said seriously ill survivors were being airlifted to hospitals in Islamabad and other cities.

He said the top medical need was for mobile operation theatres for minor surgery.

"It is taking time but now the situation is improving, so many other agencies are providing helicopters and the army has also been involved in the operation so its helicopters are also being used."

Farmanullah said people would not be evacuated on a large scale, and most survivors would be given tents to sleep in by their destroyed homes.

Water is scarce, and if meagre supplies become contaminated, it could lead to illness. Farmanullah said he was worried that children could start getting diarrhoea.

Website helps in search for relatives

The International Committee of the Red Cross has launched a website to help people search for loved ones they have lost contact with since the earthquake.

Spokesman Caspar Landolt said the website, FamilyLinks , was already in use. Those without Internet access could register in Red Cross or Red Crescent offices in Pakistan and India.

"We want to make sure that people can get access to these services. There are a large number of people - not just in the area, but around the world - who want to know what has happened to their relatives," he said.

Landolt said the ICRC had been on the ground from the start.

"The first thing you do is go out there on the road and see where you can go and what the needs are," he said, speaking from India.

"Already in those first hours and days (our teams) had emergency stocks in their vehicles which they could distribute as they went along and then report back.

"As you can imagine, communications were not very easy and they are still sometimes difficult, but they managed to communicate with us here in New Delhi, and then we could draw up lists, make tenders, make purchases and dispatch items."

He said trucks were arriving from Delhi and Punjab in India, from Kabul in neighbouring Afghanistan, and supplies were being airlifted from Amman, Jordan. A helicopter had already arrived, along with a field hospital, Landolt said.

It is usually the International Federation of Red Cross and Crescent societies that usually responds after natural disasters, but the ICRC may step in if they happen in conflict zones.

U.N. quake website

A U.N. website is collating information on the earthquake impact and relief response.

It provides assessments from the ground, details which countries and agencies are giving what, and lists useful contacts in governments and international agencies.

Maps show where search and rescue teams have been deployed.

The site details where to give donations in kind in Islamabad for Kashmir and in Mansehra for Northwest Frontier Province.

'No six-lane highway' to deliver aid

Remote and hostile terrain remains one of the biggest obstacles to getting aid to those who need it most, according to Brendan Gormley, chief executive of the Disasters Emergency Committee, an umbrella group to raise funds for 13 leading British aid agencies.

"This aid is not being delivered at the end of a six-lane highway, as it could have been in New Orleans (after Hurricane Katrina in August)," he told BBC Radio 4 on the day the DEC officially launched a public appeal for donations.

"It is a terrible challenge of mountain passes."

He said the British public was already rallying to the cause despite worries of "compassion fatigue" in a year punctuated by major natural disasters.

"People see real urgent need, and they know that our members are able to do something," he said.

According to the DEC website, the umbrella group raised ??400 million ($700 million) for survivors of the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. It received about ??40 million ($70 million) for its 2004/2005 Sudan appeal and more than ??25 million ($43 million) for the food crisis in Niger in July 2005.

DEC members are ActionAid, the British Red Cross, the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development, CARE International UK, Christian Aid, Concern, Help the Aged, Islamic Relief, Merlin, Oxfam, Save the Children, Tearfund and World Vision.

Gridlock

The oncoming winter in Kashmir and lack of clean drinking water in the quake zone are major concerns, Oxfam said.

Spokeswoman Shaista Aziz said a second flight was leaving Britain on Thursday carrying 40 tonnes of cargo for Oxfam. Supplies included winter clothes, blankets, water tanks, pumps, pipes and purification equipment.

"We are very concerned about the fact people do not have access to clean drinking water," she said.

Rivers in the quake area have been polluted by landslides. If it rains this could also increase the risk of disease because of the large number of bodies that have not been buried and because people do not have latrines.

Aziz said a major difficulty in the relief operation was that the roads were choked with cars and trucks. Oxfam will not get a helicopter until next week.

"The thing that's hindering us here is logistics in terms of transportation because the roads are jammed - they are gridlocked with trucks going in and out," Aziz said.

She said there was also concern that some women who had lost male relatives were not getting aid.

"When it comes to the distribution of aid, women are usually the last to receive it. In Muzaffarabad the women were telling us that the men were the first to get to the trucks and get what they want. Women are left at the back and are not strong enough to jostle their way into the huge crowd ... They have said they received nothing."

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