Buner & Swat Refugees Need Our Help

Buner Refguee Relief Camp

In 2005 at Stanford University, we started a Tele-health initiative for rural Pakistan. Today, By the Grace of God, we are successfully running our services on a regular basis in rural Mardan District of Pakistan (in the village of Zahidabad, NWFP 200KM North of Islamabad) at our medical facility. We have now treated close to 15,000 patients since September 2008 off which 50% are female patients.

You can see some media/videos of our efforts at : http://www.umtrust.org/media

Apparently, our hospital in Zahidabad is located at the border of Buner District and therefore, we have seen a huge influx of refugees in our area these past few weeks. In fact, we have estimated close to 100,000 refugees in a 10KM radius of our facility. The conflict has caused over 1.5 million refugees in the province of NWFP (North West Frontier Province) of Pakistan.

As a response to this crisis, UM Healthcare Trust, our non-profit, in collaboration with its stakeholders (NUST, APPNA among others) has launched a massive healthcare relief effort for the refugees streaming in from the Buner & Swat district.

A photo stream of our efforts can be seen here at

http://picasaweb.google.com/mumtaz.atif/BunerRefugees

The project is a joint collaboration between

• UM Healthcare Trust (http://www.umtrust.org),
• NUST (http://www.seecs.edu.pk), and
• APPNA (http://www.appna.org) and

is partially supported by grants from

• USAID (http://www.usaid.gov),
• ISIF (http://www.isif.asia) and
• Ordinary people like you and me.

In this hour of the need for refugees we need your support as we are running short on medical supplies. No international non-profit is operating in our area and thus our limited resources are under a lot of stress.

Please contribute generously at http://www.umtrust.org/donate

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Islamabad Hikers Club on Facebook

Here is a news alert. So all those hikers living in and around Islamabad, we now have a Facebook group to connect.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=75652559498

There are hundreds of Islamabadis who go hiking daily on numerous trails criss crossing the Margalla Hills. The most popular of them is Trail number 3 as highlighted by us in an earlier blog. Quite recently, Trail 5 seems to be attracting a lot of followers due to it being more beautiful and natural than other tracks.

One of the purposes of this group is to get these hikers to come together on one platform to discuss, plan and share insights about hiking in the vicinity of Islamabad. It may also be a great idea if we can get CDA (Capital Development Authority) to make some hiking friendly policies. And maybe, we can form a group together to go hiking on longer tracks beyond Islamabad.

So let’s spread the word and join in this group on Facebook.