Contributor: Eric Block

Kotlipaeen, North West Frontier Province — A cool morning rain can't dampen the enthusiasm of school children revved up for a special celebration. Neither can grim reminders of the devastating earthquake last fall that all but flattened this 4,000-person village.

Smoke rises from smoldering campfires used by residents to cook meals and boil water. Broken rocks and crumbled bricks mark the path through the old village, built on a plateau overlooking a fertile valley. A rainbow-colored array of tents now populate the ruins.

Two large tents have replaced the damaged primary school. While the accommodations are modest, parents in the community are grateful that their kids can finally restart their classes.

So today, in a show of that gratitude, the school's 130 students take turns reading aloud from lesson books, singing jubilant songs and dancing choreographed routines. Some deliver elaborate speeches thanking Mercy Corps for its assistance. In addition to the tents that shelter everyone from this morning's persistent drizzle, the agency provided the pens, pencils, backpacks, cricket sets, blankets and other supplies that made the classrooms complete.

Kotlipaeen's primary school is one of 16 throughout the quake zone that Mercy Corps has helped restart by erecting tents and supplying items such as bookbags, textbooks, crayons, blankets and psychosocial materials designed to aid the students' emotional recovery. As a result of these efforts, about 1,300 students in the impacted region have resumed their schooling.

Jill Jones, head of Mercy Corps’ education efforts in the North West Frontier Province, says restarting schools go a long way towards helping a community heal. “Adults have jobs,” Jones says, “and kids have jobs too. Their job is to play, to learn, to laugh — that’s how they will cope.”

Afterward the celebration winds down, the school official who emceed the event, an eloquent 22-year-old man named Sharyarkhan, gestures outside toward colorful flower bouquets and an empty stage. He regrets not being able to honor Mercy Corps with the outdoor gala the school had planned. “No other group has done work here. Mercy Corps came to the village and asked us what we needed,” he says. “Tents, desks and chairs. Schoolbooks. Everything.”

He leads his guests on a tour through the debris-filled ruins of the old school building, a short walk from the tents. Before the quake, 180 students attended school here. But Sharyarkhan predicts that enrollment in the tented facility will soon reach 200 as word spreads to nearby communities.

Part of his confidence stems from another project that Mercy Corps helped this community tackle: rebuilding the concrete bridge that links Kotlipaeen to its neighbors.

Schoolkids take turns traversing back and forth across its arch, as if the feel of new construction beneath their feet brings a certain joy. Sharyakhan and other adults, meanwhile, are eager to show off the progress they have made installing the first of two handrails on the bridge. The second will be completed tomorrow.

Then, as the honored guests depart, the kids zig-zag back toward the school for an afternoon of classes and games. By now it had stopped raining. The sky was still gray, but Kotlipaeen's future looked bright.

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Oghi Village, Konch Valley, Pakistan — The recent thaw is a welcome sign to students at Al-Hamid Public School here. They survived last October's earthquake and lived precariously through a Himalayan winter in makeshift shelters, thanks in part to an unusual piece of material provided by Mercy Corps donors.

When the quake wiped out most of the houses in this remote mountainous region just weeks before the typically harsh winter arrived, there were fears that a second wave of deaths would result from the cold weather. But a coordinated response by the government and international humanitarian agencies, including Mercy Corps, helped avert another disaster.

Throughout the bitter winter months, our distribution teams traveled to dozens of isolated villages armed with critical supplies: wood-burning stoves, metal roofing material, quilts and bundles of high-tech survival blankets.

From our base in the Mansehra district of the North West Frontier Province, our teams — traveling by jeep or by helicopter — delivered hundreds, sometimes thousands, of these blankets each day. In all, a total of 150,000 blankets will be distributed.

Here in Oghi, each of the 208 students who attend the town's tent school were given a blanket to take home after being shown how to use them to stay warm. Many students used them as shawls during the day and as an extra blanket at night. Families also hung them on the walls of their makeshift shelters to retain the precious heat. The blankets were key items in what Mercy Corps dubbed its "warm room" package, a lifesaving bundle of relief materials for families in need.

Together with Richard Berger, a Seattle entrepreneur, blanket manufacturer AFMInc. and global shipper DHL, our donors chose to make a difference in the lives of thousands of people who survived one of the deadliest earthquakes in modern history. (For more background, read "Blanket Campaign Warms Survivors," posted on Nov. 9, 2005.)

Individual donations paid for the purchase, storage and delivery of these blankets throughout the disaster zone — including the ones to the Al-Hamid Public School.

"Mercy Corps brought many things for us and cooperated with us," said the school's headmaster, M. Aftab. "We are thankful for Mercy Corps. We were in great trouble, but now things are running smoothly."

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