Paras, Pakistan – The trees along the river are starting to change color, the leaves turning yellow and gold. On the high mountains a few miles away, snow is already falling, leaving an ever-increasing coat of white far above timberline.
Sometime next month, the snow will begin to fall on Paras, a small, quake-devastated town set in a narrow valley at a bend in the Kunhar River. Very quickly, the road here – if the army has managed to clear it of landslides by then – will again be closed, until spring.
Winter is coming to the mountains of northwestern Pakistan, and some 800,000 earthquake survivors are facing the savagery of the Himalayan winter with no shelter at all.
For many, the choice is obvious. They’re fleeing.
“I need to get my family out of here before the winter,” said Syed Iftikhar, a 19-year-old university student who rushed home to Paras after the quake, walking for a day along the landslide-blocked road to help his parents and siblings.
In the harsh comparisons people use here now, he was lucky: Only one of his sisters was killed. But their home was destroyed, along with most of the other buildings in Paras.
They cannot stay. They’ve managed to get a tent, and well over a dozen people are squeezed into it. But even the thickest canvas can do little against temperatures that will drop far below freezing once winter sets in, and snows that will pile up well over 6 feet on the terraced cornfields of Paras.
“The winter here is very severe,” he said – no surprise in a 4,000-foot-high village where temperatures already hover just above freezing on some autumn nights. “How can you stay?”
With helicopter space limited, and often available only to the injured, he’s hoping the two-lane highway is quickly reopened.
Otherwise, his family will have to hike out, as he had hiked in.
The magnitude-7.6 quake that struck Oct. 8 is believed to have killed at least 79,000 people, nearly all in northwestern Pakistan, and more than 3 million people had their homes destroyed. Of those, U.N. officials estimate, about 800,000 people still have no shelter at all.
