Faith after the Quake

Four years ago today, a 7.6 magnitude earthquake devastated Kashmir. More than 80,000 people died. 3.5 million were displaced. 9,000 schools were destroyed.I recently went near the epicenter of the earthquake, to a small town called Patika, northeast of Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. I was visiting several of the schools rebuilt by Greg Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute. (Mortenson is author of the best-selling book “Three Cups of Tea”).My guide was Shaukat Ali, a 29-year-old math and science teacher at the Gundi Piran girl’s school in Patika. He described to me the day that he will never forget. He was teaching 10th-grade English at a nearby boys’ school when he heard the noise. “It sounded like bombs blasting,” he told me. “The building started to shake. ‘Bhago,’ I yelled. Run! I was thinking, I’m going to be crushed. I’m going to die.” Half the building collapsed. But not the half that he and his students were in. Classes in that half would have started at 9:30 a.m. Three hundred and twenty students were saved.He ran to the Gundi Piran school. The school building had already collapsed by the time he got there. Girls were trapped. “They were crying for help. I couldn’t do anything. There was no equipment. We couldn’t get to them,” Shaukat bhai (brother) told me, his face serene, his eyes glistening. That day, 103 girls died at the school.“One of the girls, Sara, was in the middle of writing; her pen was still in her hand when we found her,” Shaukat bhai recalled. “She was maybe 15 or 16. She was doing her science exam. I buried her. One girl always used to wear big earrings to school; that’s how I recognized her. Her face was too badly damaged. Shaukat bhai recounted story… Read full article