Kashmir: Aid has not yet reached thousands of survivors hidden high in the Himalayas, reports Ramita Navai.
A worn woman crouches in a tiny, black rocky hollow in the side of a crag at the top of a mountain, 7,500 feet high. A thin layer of hay is all that protects her from the jagged stone that juts out around her like sharp teeth.
Here she sleeps with her 10-year-old daughter, balancing on the tiny ledge that hangs over a sheer drop to the valley below. Not all her family survived the earthquake that killed more than 86,000 people and left three and a half million homeless.
"At least from here I can see my other daughter's grave," she says, pointing to a small, fresh mound lovingly adorned with white pebbles and slithers of silver tinsel. Around her are her only possessions that she dug out of the mounds of earth that was once her home: a small, rusty suitcase and a bundle of ragged clothes wrapped in a filthy shawl.
"This is all I have. But I don't want to leave my land. I won't leave my daughter's grave," she says.
Like most villagers in the Machiara Valley, Gulam Fatimah does not know her age. Her hands are calloused and her face is worn and creased by years of hard labour. Since her husband slipped off the ridge of a mountain while cutting grass, she has ploughed the hard land with her bare hands, harvested wheat and maize and taken care of her cattle. The only thing to celebrate here is surviving another year.
Before the earthquake obliterated the hamlet of Duliard, Gulam's neighbours would help her from time to time. But now the villagers are battling for their own survival and widows like Gulam must fend for themselves.
Every day, Gulam's young daughter climbs a steep, perilous mountain path to another valley to collect water, which she carries on her head in a heavy metal urn. The earthquake dried up all the mountain springs and the journey to fetch water takes several hours.
While other survivors have cobbled together makeshift shelters from rags and bits of wood, Gulam is too old and too frail to build. The hole in the rock was the only shelter she could find, but even still the icy wind howls in, lashing rain into the small crevice in the rock.
Temperatures are plummeting and pneumonia is taking hold. All Gulam has to protect her and her daughter against the encroaching Himalayan winter is her thin shawl.
The weather has already turned in Machiara Valley. A glistening white carpet of snow spills down from a small, dense forest at the top of a buttress, in the middle of which is a small graveyard. Rows of new graves are squeezed in between the trees, marked simply with the date that changed these villagers' lives: October 8th, 2005.
Aid has not yet reached thousands of survivors who are hidden high in the Himalayas, cut off by thick valleys, deep gorges and impenetrable mountains.
There are no roads here and often even helicopters cannot land.
But now a team of mountain climbers, poached from the United Nations by the International Organisation for Migration, is hiking up to these forgotten survivors who no one else can reach.
Using a network of helicopters, Claude-André Nadon and Jean-Philippe Bourgeois jump off in the middle of valleys to climb higher and deeper into the mountains until they reach the first signs of devastation.
"We've been focusing on the most remote places because they're the places that everyone else will get to last," says Nadon.
Before Nadon and Bourgeois arrived in Machiara, no aid had reached the area.
The villages are pockmarked with the earthquake's devastation.
Gaping black cavities dot the green land, the sunken remains of the traditional timber houses where the weight of the enormous collapsed mud roofs buried everything deep into the ground.
There are no helicopter flights available to transport relief items to the valley, and no mules and no porters to help.
Nadon and Bourgeois must lug the heavy stacks of tarpaulin sheets and blankets on their backs, climbing up the steep track to Machiara. They are used to hard working conditions - between them they have scaled Everest, K2 and Kilimanjaro.
They pitch their tent, assess the damage and meet with village elders. In Machiara, word is out that help has finally arrived. Under a blue sky, the villagers stream down from the ruins. They queue patiently, waiting for the blanket and sheet of tarpaulin that will save their lives.
But some cases need more than just a handout.
The sun has begun its quick descent when Nadon spots Gulam.
He sends blankets up for tonight and tells her he will be back in the morning.
"I was waiting for help. And it came," Gulam says.
Early the next day, carrying their tools and tarpaulin sheets, the mountaineers hike up to Gulam. Making a clearing beside the tumbled wreckage of her home they get to work, digging at the earth and sifting through the rubble for logs that they salvage to build a tent-like shelter.
After an hour, Gulam's shelter is ready. Holding her daughter's hand, she steps inside and silently sits down.
"I am happy. I have a shelter and I am near my daughter's grave," she says simply.
No one knows how many people are still without shelter. The Pakistan military have claimed that all households above 5,000 feet have received aid, but every day the mountaineering teams stumble on more devastation.
"Just look around. All over there are people who haven't been reached.
"Nobody here has shelter," says Bourgeois.
As Nadon and Bourgeois make their way back down to their tent, they meet other widows with small children, sleeping on the freezing earth, with no clothes or blankets.
The village elders want the mountain climbing aid workers to stay, but soon they must leave.
"There are too many other villages out there that haven't been reached," says Nadon, nodding his head towards the valleys that stretch out endlessly around him.
"It's a big job."
