The villagers say it was the earthquake that opened up the huge crack in the snow-covered Chakast peak towering in the backdrop. At its base, surrounded by gold- and orange-hued maple and poplar trees, lies Muldeh, one of a cluster of six hamlets located 8,000 feet up in the Hindu Kush mountains. On this cold November day, the watery sun offers no warmth and the temperature hovers a few degrees above freezing.

Ordinarily, the cold is of no real concern for these hardy people; it is merely a phase in the yearly cycle of the seasons. But what was normal is not so any longer, and the prospect of winter is cause for dread, for Muldeh is among the hundreds of hamlets in upper Chitral’s Mastuj tehsil that were badly affected by the Oct 26 earthquake. Almost all the houses here were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable by the tremors, leaving residents at the mercy of the elements.

“The temperature goes down to -20ºC here at the height of winter,” says Bulbul Wali, a village elder with a wizened face further creased with worry. He is wearing a long woollen chogha and fingering a string of prayer beads. “The days between Dec 21 and Jan 21 are particularly severe: everything is buried under up to two or even three feet of snow.”

With most able-bodied men toiling in faraway cities, many of the residents left behind are senior citizens and retirees of the Chitral Scouts, the local militia, who had built their homes with modest retirement payouts. These structures are particularly vulnerable in an earthquake because they are usually built with mud bricks — often made on site by the families themselves — that are dried in the sun and joined together with mud. With the nearest factories located in Cherat and Kohat, cement is prohibitively expensive in Chitral — far beyond the villagers’ means.

The only building constructed with cement in Muldeh is the jamaatkhana — the house of worship for the Ismaili sect to which around 60pc of the villagers belong — and it withstood the quake well.

Elsewhere in the village, the consequences of the earthquake are strewn all around. What were once homes coalesced into shapeless mounds of earth, burying cooking utensils, warm clothes and various essentials of life. The structures that didn’t collapse are fractured and unstable. During the first few days, shaken and terrified families were allowed shelter in the jamaatkhana, while they tried to salvage what they could from the ruins. A trickle of aid — tents and ration — began arriving.

As in much of Pakistan, extended families are the norm here, but this cluster of six villages received only 50 tents from the government to accommodate the residents of the 139 homes that had been completely destroyed. Moreover, the tents are of poor quality and utterly inadequate for the frigid temperatures. Some of the villagers are visibly angry. “It gets so cold that water freezes in the pipelines and they expect people to live in such flimsy shelters?” asks Attaullah Jan, a teacher.

Meanwhile some 70 kilometres away in Chitral city, which sustained minimal damage, young District Commissioner Osama Ahmed Warraich is seated in the warm glow of a heater behind his chair. He seems fairly sanguine for someone in charge of a disaster affecting thousands in his constituency. “As you can see, even now I’m sitting here signing compensation cheques,” he says. “The people should start receiving them within a week.”

For those who are suffering, mainly in small mountain villages who had few resources to begin with, that is no reassurance. “The government has yet to fulfil the promises it made after the flash floods in July,” says Abdul Ghaffar, a journalist in Mroi Payeen village. “How can we believe what they say?” In some places, it is impossible to cultivate the wheat crop this season because watercourses destroyed by the raging waters have still not been repaired, four months later.

Moreover, at sunset, villages across Mastuj tehsil plunge into darkness because electricity to the area has yet to be restored after the 4.2-megawatt Reshun hydropower station was destroyed by the flash floods. This compounds the miseries of the people now also dealing with the aftermath of the earthquake. According to an aid worker in Chitral, “What is worse is that the government could have by now installed locally built mini hydropower generators at several places. That would be much cheaper and get electricity to the people quickly.”

Out of desperation, given the government’s lackadaisical response, some people have started doing makeshift repairs on their homes — assuming the structures are still standing. But this is not the season for building: the sunlight is too weak and intermittent to dry the mud.

According to the Chitral DC, the government has taken the lead in delivering most of the relief thus far. “The NDMA chairman also flew in to see me, and has promised 5,000 plastic sheets [to cover the tents],” he says. Local sources, however, maintain that the relief effort has almost entirely been handled by NGOs including Edhi, Elaj Trust, Focus Humanitarian Assistance, Karachi Relief Trust (KRT) etc as well as religious organisations such as the Falah-i-Insaniyat Foundation and Al-Khidmat. Some worked in the initial days and left: others are still delivering food and warm clothing. But safe and warm shelters are the most pressing need, one that the government appears least concerned about.

Not everyone, however, is without a plan. KRT is building CGI shelters lined internally with plywood sheets and Dawn Relief is working to construct fibreglass ‘igloos’ that can be quickly and cheaply assembled.

It is a race against time. Due to the lower number of casualties, the 2015 earthquake pales in comparison to the one in 2005, in which the eyes of the world were riveted on horrific scenes of death and destruction.

However, because those living through the aftermath of this year’s quake are out of sight of the cameras, the bitter winds of winter could yet exact a terrible toll.

Published in Dawn, November 13th, 2015