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Well, it's one am and the end of
another exhausting day. It's fairly
full-on out here - lots of chaos and interesting things happening.
We started the day before breakfast with a visit to the Iranian Red
Crescent's warehouse where most of the Save the Children stuff from
the flight which came in went to - thirty seven tonnes of tents,
blankets and children's clothes... Most of it is still there, but
alas someone has carefully opened each packet of clothes for the
children and scattered the lovingly packed contents over the floor of
the enormous concrete room which used to be a cold store for dates
and is now the Red Crescent's store for one of the 12 zones into
which Bam has been divided.
I can honestly say that I've never seen anything quite so utterly
disorganised; there are shoes five deep all over the floor -
naturally not in pairs - so that the whole storeroom looks like a
display from Auschwitz.Then, to add to the fun, yesterday the Iranian
army who are providing security had been firing to keep the crowds
back - today we went really early in order to get our truck loaded
before the crowds arrived - our cunning plan to avoid being involved
in a security incident nearly backfired horribly when we were caught
by a major aftershock while we were inside the enormous building - a
5 Richter quake hit us and we ran for the corridor out - if it had
been much bigger I think the building would have come down on us, and
we wouldn't have stood a chance - a massive concrete building
pancaking in on us wouldn't have left much possibility of survival -
as it was part of the outer skin of the storeroom which we were in
had collapsed - definitely one of the 9 lives used up there... If we
are going to continue to use this store - and it is one of the very
few usable buildings in town - the destruction really has been
enormous - then we are going to need to have someone in charge of
controlling access to our stuff - and I really have misgivings about
employing anyone to sit inside a building all day long at the moment.
For ourselves, we are camping in a sports stadium which was initially
used as a hospital and is now the site for the international relief
effort's camp. This means that we get woken every morning to the
grunts of a strange Korean team who dress in black uniforms with
goggles & hats and salute their flag first thing. All very
entertaining but a little odd - presumably they are some sort of
bizarre paramilitary fascist group - they certainly look and behave
like a private army. A couple of days ago they produced a power
spray mister and began pumping clouds of gas around the campsite -
turned out to be disinfectant not Sarin gas, but we did wonder!
It's tomorrow now - Monday 12th. I'm finishing here in five days,
but Carol will remain in Iran for another few weeks. It's been
another day of full-on activity - delivery of 100 military type tents
to the hospital, dealing with the local Red Crescent representative
who doesn't want us here and is trying to stop us doing anything -
because of course the Red Crescent is completely able to cope without
foreign assistance... the usual politics. At least this time we
were able to play off the Ministry of Health against the Red Crescent
- there is apparently a lot of animosity because the Red Crescent got
all the publicity for pulling people out of the rubble even though it
was the hospitals who actually did the treatment of the survivors.
Not our problem and actually very convenient for us since it means
that we can get on with our work and let the govt departments slug it
out against each other!
Currently we're trying to chase a hundred tents which we gave to a
hospital so the staff had somewhere to live - since then the head of
one of the heads of the Iranian Red Crescent told us that the person
we'd given the tents to had been arrested for selling them. But the
Interior Ministry denies that there's anything going on, and the
staff at the hospital say that some of the tents are there and
haven't been given to them, but haven't been sold either... it's one
more mystery which we'll never get to the bottom of - every day
brings more bizarre stuff which even the Iranians working for us
don't understand. I guess this is what you get when you try to work
in a town which used to be famous for the opium smuggling and general
banditry all the way to the Afghan and Pakistan borders!
Meanwhile we have 4 trucks coming from Pakistan, and they have been
stopped in Zahedan, the town on the Pakistan border about 350km from
here. Depending on who tells you the story they have either been
siezed by the Iranian Red Crescent, the Iranian Army, the UN, Iranian
Customs or Tentacled Tent-Eaters from Pluto (well, I made the last
one up, but all the others have been told to us!). Even more
strangely while we were being assured by the truck company that the
trucks were still loaded and just waiting for paperwork to be sorted
out the first load of the stuff from them was being delivered to the
Red Crescent Warehouse we are using, on a Red Crescent truck, even
though it apparently hasn't been taken off our own truck yet... If I
wasn't leaving here in the morning at the end of my contract then I'd
have loved to go down to the border and try to sort out what exactly
really is going on - lots of scams of various sorts I suspect! - but
as it is I guess we'll never know...
So, that's life in Bam, with the wind blowing all day and night, dust
everywhere, living in tents with no mains electricity or showers,
clean clothes etc and general wierdness all around (including the
question why we can't have electricity when the streetlights are on
just outside the campsite!) while the Iranians shake their heads in
wonder at us all - especially all the Americans who were rushed out
here in order to cement relations with the newly compliant Iranian
govt... All a very surreal experience.
Photos of the Bam Earthquake, Iran Dec 27th 2003
