Quake orphans and widows lose safe haven

The sound of children playing, which till a few weeks ago could be heard all around the building housing the Ashiana shelter for women and children, has faded away.

Home to orphaned quake victims, widows and the elderly over the past year, the Ashiana shelter was shut down in late October as a result of wrangling between officials of the government’s Ministry of Social Welfare (MoSW) and the NGO which ran the operation.

The shelter was set up to house orphans, widows and the destitute soon after last year’s earthquake, which devastated parts of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, leaving at least 73,000 dead.

An abandoned residential complex, located around 80 km northeast of the federal capital Islamabad near the small town of Hattian in the Attock district, was selected for the purpose.

Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf, who had originally set up a shelter scheme for children and women left on their own after the quake, took considerable personal interest in the venture, with his wife visiting the facility to find out the welfare of those housed there.

An agreement was reached in late 2005 between the MoSW and the Khubaib Foundation, a local NGO, to run the shelter – envisaged as a permanent home for children and women. The shelter housed 650 people at one stage, and with vocational training workshops for women, classrooms, playground facilities for children and clinics manned by experts and offices all in place, it buzzed with life.

The Khubaib Foundation said at the time it planned to run the shelter for as long as it was required and would assume guardianship of orphans, widows and destitute women there.

But hopes that the shelter would serve as a model housing solution for some of the most vulnerable quake victims quickly disappeared. Wrangling over financial matters, accusations by the Khubaib Foundation of undue interference by ministry officials and a resultant breakdown of trust eventually led to closure before it had completed even a year in existence.

Those housed there at the time of its closure have been dispatched to relatives, handed over to orphanages or entrusted to the governments of NWFP and Pakistani-administered Kashmir.

“We spent 40 million rupees [about US $666,000] on setting up schools, establishing health facilities and other services at the centre, but the ministry refused to pay half the sum as had been agreed in the Memorandum of Understanding,” a spokesperson for the Khubaib Foundation told IRIN.

Till early October, the NGO was said to be making efforts to extract the sum from the government.

Ministry officials firmly deny the allegations made. Additional Secretary Mohammad Noor Saghir Khan has said that the shelter was closed down as it was “never supposed to be a permanent organisation”.

The result though, is that many women and children have lost a place to live where they had found some semblance of security after the trauma of the quake.

“I was happy at the shelter. Now I am living with relatives near my village in Muzaffarabad, but I feel as if I am a burden to them,” said Kulsoom Bibi, 24, a young widow who spent seven months at Ashiana along with her son, now three years old.

In June 2006, the Federal Minister for Social Welfare and Special Education, Zobaida Jalal, told Pakistan’s upper house of parliament that there were still 141 women with no relatives and 463 orphans, unaccompanied and separated children from the earthquake-affected areas of NWFP and Kashmir.

Some of these children remain at camps in Muzaffarabad or other locations, others at temporary shelters. Observes say there is still a need to find a lasting solution to their plight, and meet the need for safe housing, security and a source of livelihood that many still urgently need over one year after the quake that shattered their lives.

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