Free Deep Field by Tom Bamforth

camps—monitoring teams would report that a site they had visited the day before, a thriving community, had been bulldozed and no one knew where the people had gone. Despite repeated calls for a more cooperative response to the residual camps, allowing people time and giving them information about their options (if there were any), the pace of camp destruction continued. My counterpart, the Commissioner for Camps, was normally the Commissioner for Afghan Refugees, a position that afforded him considerable influence over trade between the two countries, and he was keen to return to his more lucrative day job. For him, the residuals were both a blot on the relief effort and an impediment to obtaining greater riches.
    I had grown to like the camps, and would sometimes walk through the nearest ones at night when I had finished work or needed a break. Although they were crowded with people housed in poor-quality tents, I found something almost reassuring about passing through the nightly rituals of family life after the frenetic work of the day. Fires were lit, lights were on, people talked in the warmth of the evening and fascinatingly, for a country in which domestic life is so closed to anyone beyond the immediate extended family, they offered me the chance to glimpse behind the scenes.
    But another emergency was waiting. The camps and the tents had been put up quickly following the earthquake, and a year later people still lived under the now-worn canvas. In Australia, for people to still be living under canvas more than a few days after a major disaster was seen as a failure of the state response, but in Pakistan families of five to seven people had been living in tents for almost twelve months. While most had tried to go back, these people could not—entire villages had been swept away in a deluge of earth and there were no homes to return to; some were tenants who no longer had land tenure, others had had their livelihoods or farmlands destroyed. These were no malingerers, and in any case the camps were no place to stay if there was any other viable option. Those in the decrepit residual camps now faced a second winter under canvas with even less than they’d had during the immediate emergency response, and with a freeze on further relief activity. The apparent pleasures of family life on long summer evenings were a temporary reprieve: in a few months’ time the camp would become water-logged mud pits with shelters that could not conceivably withstand the harshness of the Himalayan winter.
    One of the frequent visitors to our office was a representative from a small Italian education NGO that was providing food, shelter and ongoing education to children who had lost everything—a vital attempt to stave off the longer-term loss of opportunity and ‘development gains’ that disasters bring in their wake. In her perfect Italian-inflected English, my friend Alberta would storm in and demand, ‘What about the children?’ I tried to help by supplying her NGO with the relief provisions we had—clothes, blankets, roofing materials, tents, hygiene kits, water purifiers, anything that we could provide. But it was difficult—response is in many ways an economy of scale and, collectively, we were trying to assist 700,000 people across the North West Frontier. While drawing up relief distribution plans for hundreds of thousands of items, Alberta’s requests were very specific. When a shipment of 50,000 sets of assorted children’s clothes came through, Alberta appeared in the office.
    ‘I want thirty-four,’ she said adamantly.
    ‘For fuck’s sake, Alberta,’ I intemperately replied, ‘can’t you at least take five hundred?’
    The average family size was estimated at 7.44 and we were aiming for ‘coverage’ of the entire population, which did not generally cater for specific needs. But she insisted, rightly, and putting the dictates of the majority aside we packed and repacked until she had the exact