mordant wit

As a journalist who covered last year's Asian tsunami, I never thought I could feel anything like nostalgia for that terrible event. But that was before I saw what the earthquake did to the Allai Valley in Pakistan.

A ruggedly beautiful place of terraced farm fields and stream-laced forests, the valley is -- or was -- home to an estimated 200,000 people, more than half of whom are thought to have lost their dwellings in the earthquake that devastated northern Pakistan on Oct. 8. By the time I landed in a Pakistani army helicopter three weeks later, landslides still blocked most roads into the valley, and many survivors had yet to receive any help.

At the ruined village where I spent an afternoon, families were living in crude shelters made from empty cement bags and salvaged timbers. That night, I camped with a handful of soldiers on the grounds of a wrecked medical clinic. As I lay shivering on the hard earth, too cold to sleep and cursing myself for not having brought a better sleeping bag, I could not imagine how the villagers would cope with winter's heavy snows.