The Ladakh Relief Effort
So there she goes. A young woman holding a child by her right hand and clutching a brand-new woollen blanket under her left arm. She is the destination of what started out with the raising of €9281 by the Danja foundation in the Netherlands. She is a woman from Hanu Thang, a village so high up in Ladakh that it is close to Pakistan but feels as if we have reached the edge of the world. She and her family are one of twenty families in this village that were hit by flash floods and landslides last August. What exactly has happened to her I do not know; perhaps her house has vanished; perhaps her relatives are dead or injured; she has not told us her story. The time for telling stories is now over. It is now two months after the events took place. But it was her name that was mentioned on a list of victims. That’s why she received this blanket. From you. From us.
Only just before, twenty of those blankets had been offloaded from a truck, along with twenty pressure cookers, twenty bags of milk powder, flour, and rice, and twenty bottles of cooking oil. This truck contained a total of 9700 kg worth of aid goods, enough to offer 250 affected families something to make it through the approaching winter.
The weather is lovely now, but the nights are chilly, there is a lost autumnal tree here and there, and winter is approaching next month. I cannot begin to imagine what it must be like, those severe winters here, but I’m hoping that this blanket will offer warmth, protection, and shelter to this woman and her child. I am hoping it will make a real difference for her. Do well, mother and child, pull through, live, and be happy in this desolate place. Juley juley.
This truck was driven here by driver Mohammed all the way from the city of Jammu. Jammu was the logistics centre for all preparations involved in this relief effort, and it is situated in the far bottom left-hand corner of the Indian federal state of Jammu & Kashmir. This is the home of Virender Prakash, the relief effort’s initiator. The money that was raised flew to a bank in this city. This is where the entire relief effort team convened: Razak from his village near Srinagar, Govinda from his village near Manali, and Rikkert from his village in the Netherlands. I arrived here from Delhi in a small sleeper cabin on an endless train that snaked its way through the night up to Jammu. And this is also where Mohammed and his truck were hired and where all aid goods were purchased from local shops.
On the day of my arrival in this city and my reunion with Virender, Razak, and Govinda, all the shopkeepers needed to be paid for what had been purchased from their shops. Imagine this. The Dutch euros had flown to Jammu electronically and had changed into rupees. In India, two euros is a 100 rupee banknote. Nine thousand euros equal 4,500 banknotes of 100 rupees. All donations had been converted into giant piles of Indian money. Mafia-like quantities of money.
This money was put into a plastic bag, which was put into a shopping bag. Razak, Govinda, and Manu, our local tuk-tuk driver in Jammu, all three had a fine black moustache. Virender, wearing sunglasses, was incognito. I was the tallest, blondest, and whitest man to be found in all of Jammu: there wasn’t a single other Westerner left in the city due to the riots in Kashmir. The five of us squeezed into Manu’s tuk-tuk, and off we went. To the blanket shop, the pressure cooker shop, the rice shop. In all these places, we left a wad of money from the plastic bag until it was empty and all those Indian rupees had been converted into 9700 kg worth of aid goods. On that very same day, these were loaded onto Mohammed’s truck, which departed for Ladakh that very same night. We would follow in a passenger car two days later.
On my map of India, there is only one road through the whole of Jammu & Kashmir: it goes up from Jammu to Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, and from there it bends to the right, to Leh, the capital of Ladakh. In Srinagar and its surrounding area, there have been about a hundred casualties this summer in skirmishes between separatist Muslims and Indian security troops. Feelings are running high, schools have been closed down and flights cancelled, there are riots in the streets, stones are thrown, there are curfews. Srinagar is a no-go area. And yet we need to pass by it in our car, following the truck. On the outskirts of the city, we need to pass through about four paramilitary control posts with barbed wire roadblocks on the road. This involves some cloak-and-dagger scheming: ‘You sit in the front, Rikkert, and behave like Our Very Special Guest.’ Then we are driving by Dal Lake, cross the Sozila pass, leave the Kashmir Valley, and enter Ladakh.
KHALTSE. A mudhole somewhere along this one road between Srinagar and Leh. This is where it will all take place. This is where truck and team will reunite. This will be our basis for distributing all aid goods in affected villages in a single day. This day is Wednesday 29 September.
From Khaltse, our convoy departs very early on that day to the north, along the river Indus. Onwards, high mountain slopes left and right, the wide river all the way down, and our convoy suspended on a winding thread in between. As we progress, things are getting ever higher, stonier, rougher, wilder, more remote and more desolate. Do people live here? Yes, they live here and they have not seen a single aid organisation yet. The landscape is proud and hard. Everything is made of stones: the mountain slopes, the river beds, the prayer tables, the houses, the heaps of rubble. There is only a small essential difference between the one and the other. For these proud mountains are also vulnerable. It takes only one good shower for everything to rearrange itself: from slope into bed, up into down, standing into lying. This is exactly what happened on 5 August 2010.
Archina Thang. Hanu Thang. Hanu Yogma. Ledo. Dumkhar. These are the names of some of the places where the stones rearranged themselves on that fifth of August. These are communities that were scarred when slope became bed and up came down. We drive into them and park truck and car on village squares. People gather. The head of the village turns up. In one village, we are parked bang in the middle of the trail of destruction; everyone is involved in carrying building materials, little boys, 13-year-old girls, wrinkly men and women. Razak, Govinda, and I offload stuff: 22 of everything here, 20 of everything there, and 94 of everything in the village in which everyone is so engaged in a buzz of reconstruction activity. Everything is counted, piled up, ticked off on lists. Then we’re done and, after many handshakes and Juleys, we depart, leaving everyone with a sign of solidarity from the Netherlands.
Shall I end my story in a minor key and say that Virender Prakash, outside Ladakh, is not credited in his own country with the understanding, esteem, and appreciation he deserves for what he has achieved? No, let me say in conclusion that he in India, we in the Netherlands, and the people of Ladakh are connected with one another by a shared Himalayas feeling. The proud, sometimes cute, and at times savage Himalayas, which have given us so much and to which we have now given something in return. Just like the woman with her child, 249 other people walked home that day with food, a pressure cooker, and a blanket. Supported and strengthened. By you. By us.