By Zofeen T. Ebrahim
Shamim Bano, a middle-school teacher, has recently returned from a fortnight in Kabul where she taught Afghan women to do search and rescue work. The training “involved climbing mountains and gorges using ropes and harnesses, using ziplines and rappelling. Any wrong move and you can start a rock fall,” she explained.
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Bano lives in Pakistan’s northernmost region of Gilgit-Baltistan, a place where three of the world’s highest mountain ranges converge — the Hindu Kush, the Karakoram range, and the Himalayas. This includes 50 mountain peaks that overtop 7,000 metres, and five that exceed 8,000 metres, including K2, the world’s second highest peak. Powerful mountain rivers, including the Hunza and the Gilgit slice through the region, and there are hundreds of glaciers.
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Other communities facing increasing disaster risks are those in Chitral in the mountainous province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and in the coastal areas of Sindh province, Shah said.
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Dedicated teams of women volunteers are an important part of working with communities in effective ways, though men and women are trained together, said Bibi Nusrat, a 40-year old nurse from Karimabad, who has worked as a CBDRM training officer in AKAH-P’s Chitral office since 2000. She visits disaster-prone villages to train communities in how to protect themselves: in 2020, she visited 15 of the 150 avalanche-prone villages in Chitral.
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