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A Mountain to Climb: What needs to be done to prevent further deaths following the Pakistan earthquake and to enable survivors to rebuild their lives and livelihoods

12 pages

‘I sat and spoke to a group of women in one of Muzaffarabad's main parks — once a beautiful green space full of flowers, now a home for people with nowhere left to go. One woman told me how she had lost her two children when her house came down over her head. She had managed to survive because it was God's will, she said: she had been chosen to be kept alive. It was at this point that I noticed her bulging belly — it looked out of place on her fragile frame and I realised that she was pregnant. If three million people are in need in Pakistan as a result of the disaster, how many other women now find themselves in her position — homeless, pregnant, and in mourning? Nothing could have brought home harder the awful scale of this disaster — and of the work that needs to be done.’

KeywordsReconstruction Pakistan