Last October, Mercy Corps distributed 1,500 tents, gerry cans, and boxes of food, blankets and other emergency relief items to people in the village of Balimung, Pakistan. Photo Credit: Cassandra Nelson/Mercy Corps

John Stephens is one of four Mercy Corps program officers who focus on South Asia — a part of the world that is, as Stephens laughingly conceded, "action-packed." His frequent travels to South Asia give him a unique perspective on the successes and challenges of rebuilding earthquake-ravaged northern Pakistan, one year later.

Q: First of all, take us back one year. What's your memory of the quake and the days that followed?

John Stephens: I was in Pakistan when the quake happened, but I was down in Quetta, which wasn't
really affected. We went up to the quake zone a few days afterward. Mercy Corps had health programs in Pakistan already, so we had a lot of doctors on staff and were able to form a response team pretty quickly.

So we go up, and it's just pure mayhem. You would hear wildly fluctuating stories and reports. We found a military base, and the army flew us in an old Russian helicopter over the landslides and the high valleys that had really seen the worst of the destruction. We set up our first mobile hospital. I think we've now done six.

When we were initially in Balakot, the most heavily destroyed city, there was literally nothing standing—not a park bench, not a light post.

How do you deal with a situation like that? How do you mobilize people?

John Stephens encountered a level of destruction in Pakistan that required "talking not about rebuilding individual homes, but reconstructing entire cities."

When we would go into villages, we'd say elect someone to represent you and tell us what your priorities are, then we'll try to take on the top one or two. In one area, bridges over rivers that had connected some villages had been knocked down, so we helped them rebuild. And when I went back, people were very happy about that, and also a bit surprised. I mean, people go up into these areas all the time and say they're going to do things. I'm sure that every political season, they have people come in and promise all sorts of things. So to have a bunch of internationals — and Mercy Corps' South Asia team is very international; there are Brits and Poles and Afghans and all sorts of people — come in and actually get something done I think pleased people very much.

You were in Pakistan again this spring. What did you see that you took as evidence of positive change?

The schools we established are in tents, but they're getting a level of attention, support and resources from government and international agencies they didn't have before. The teachers are getting their salaries. The kind of community organization we did is what really lasts — you get that kind of democratic, grassroots activity going on, and it sticks with people. I think that was what really delighted people about the bridge reconstruction I just mentioned. It was one of their first experiences with a real, transparent, concrete political process.

On the other hand, there have obviously been delays in things like housing reconstruction, and it sounds like some of those problems are due to bureaucracy more than anything else. Is that true?

It's similar to what I saw after the tsunami in India, where the government played a central role in the reconstruction. In India, the government designed temporary housing that was inappropriate and ultimately was widely rejected by the communities it was built to serve. It wasn't quite that bad in Pakistan, but the government did try to impose some things that, in the end, didn't work and slowed things down.

The level of destruction was such that you're really talking not about rebuilding individual homes, but reconstructing entire cities. It's similar to the complications you've seen in the wake of Katrina. It's just a much harder, more complex thing to do.

Pakistan's politics always sound like they're pretty complex. Have the country's internal issues affected Mercy Corps operations?

To have a woman come in and lead a community meeting really rocks some people's worlds.

We would hear things, from time to time, about conservative clerics being upset, for example, that women — foreign women — were playing such an active role. To have a woman come in and lead a community meeting really rocks some people's worlds. But in these kind of situations, what people really want is for their communities to be rebuilt. So those conservative voices don't really have much traction at a time like that.

What about the broader regional and international politics that are so enmeshed with that part of the world?

I think if you'd gone up there before the quake and asked people for their opinion of the United States, you would have gotten some negative responses—though I certainly don't think people in that region support Al Qaeda or anything like that. They would be reacting to what they see in the news, which is unpopular wars and rhetoric. But after the quake, the presence of Americans was actually welcomed pretty enthusiastically. People thought it was great. The goodwill generated by a little bit of help is unbelievable.

Obviously, this reconstruction will be an on-going process for a long time, but what can you say you've learned at this point?

For Mercy Corps, it's pretty important to realize that the physical reconstruction is just going to move at it's own pace. Meanwhile, the most useful thing for us to do is work on community organization, education and economic development. If you get cash into people's hands, in most cases they can take care of themselves. The rebuilding is really happening at the community level, not the individual level, so imparting the skills to communities that let them help themselves is really what makes the most sense for us as an organization. It's what we do.




Contributed by Zach Dundas, Mercy Corps.

To read another Global Envision article about rebuilding in post-disaster areas, see Rebuilding and Prevention in Tsunami-Hit Areas.



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