Aid Fails to Meet Needs of Afghan Quake Survivors

RUSTAQ, Afghanistan —  Thousands of people huddling against the cold overwhelmed aid workers reaching earthquake-racked northeastern Afghanistan on Wednesday with supplies too meager to ease the enormous suffering.

Shivering survivors cowered beneath plastic sheets, their only protection against the cold and snow. Women clinging to infants wrapped in ice-caked blankets begged relief workers for help.

“Please help us, we have lost everything,” a veiled woman shouted, stumbling down the muddy road from the village of Kezer as aid workers drove past. A man standing at her side simply wept.

One week after the magnitude 6.1 earthquake and subsequent aftershocks killed more than 4,000 people, snow, fog, mud and civil war continued to frustrate rescue efforts.

Those obstacles were compounded by fresh fears that the death toll may rise. Jacques Tremblay, an official with the aid group Doctors Without Borders, said 4,300 people are missing, either trapped or dead in the remote villages and hamlets hardest hit by the quake.

Of the 27 remote villages obliterated in the quake, only two have roads. Ghanji, eight miles from Rustaq, is one of them. The road is little more than a trail.

Villagers from the hamlet gathered on a cliff to watch an International Committee of the Red Cross aid convoy approach. They quickly realized their suffering was far from over.

The convoy consisted of only one car full of supplies, a backup car and three cars bringing reporters.

Village elders determined which families were neediest and then called out family names as the aid was passed out: blankets, five tents, cooking supplies and children’s boots. The supplies had to be carried the last few hundred yards; the cars could go no farther.

In neighboring Pakistan, a U.N. plane loaded supplies and prepared to leave today if the weather held, said Sarah Russell, a U.N. spokeswoman. Flights were canceled the two previous days.

Rescue efforts were further hampered by almost 20 years of civil war, which has destroyed Afghanistan’s infrastructure and erected impenetrable front lines across its shattered highways.