By Ayesha Akram
A hushed news meeting is under way on the sidewalk that borders the thirteen glistening blue and green tents that make up Radio Muzaffarabad’s “offices.” It is two minutes to air, and Tahir Chughtai, the program producer, looks worried. A colleague whispers in his ear. He nods vigorously and strides over to the broadcast booth. “You’re on,” he says, poking his head into the tent. Seconds later, a cracked “On Air” sign lights up. “It’s 2 p.m., and this is Radio Muzaffarabad,” begins Nisar Fatima in her native Urdu. “In this hour we will bring you news from the earthquake zone.”
Music comes up, and Fatima adjusts the drab red shawl covering her head against the chilly wind. The on-air light dims, and her calm demeanor evaporates. “It’s still difficult to work,” she says. “My heart isn’t in it.”
Fatima, who is twenty-one and a part-time host at the station, lost two cousins, four friends, two classmates, and a devoted teacher in the 7.6-magnitude earthquake that hit northern Pakistan on October 8, killing an estimated 85,000 people and leaving three million homeless. Fifteen days after the quake, Radio Muzaffarabad, a government-owned station in the city of the same name and nestled in the Himalayas, was back on the air with borrowed equipment. It is now more than four months since the quake hit, and the station is the single, precarious thread that binds this wounded city of about half a million residents. More than just a source of news and information, Radio Muzaffarabad has been a way for people — most of whom are still living in tents — to talk to one another; it has helped families find missing loved ones, facilitated mourning, and inspired the desperate to persevere.
Chughtai’s tent, which faces the ruins of the station’s old studio, functions as a makeshift headquarters. Five of the station’s engineers sleep here at night. A dirt-smudged computer whirs laboriously next to the lone fax machine. “We don’t even have one quarter of what we lost,” says Chughtai. “We’re barely surviving.”
Where the station once reached five million listeners in a hundred-mile radius of Muzaffarabad, its depleted signal, powered by a one-kilowatt transmitter, now struggles to make it forty-five miles. Of its 115 employees, three were killed in the quake and forty-two others quit, too grief-stricken to stay on. Airtime was reduced from sixteen hours to eleven, and the regular programming was scrapped as the station urged listeners to call in with requests for help or messages to send out. People responded with over a hundred calls a day.
But today is Eid, a religious holiday, and Chughtai thinks listeners could do with a little less reality. He asks a producer to broadcast some music. “Let’s get their spirits up,” he says. “Let’s add smiles to their faces.”
A handful of music tapes salvaged from the rubble are scattered on a table in the engineering tent. Pervaiz Minhas, a broadcast engineer, plays a patriotic classic, “Oh! Life.” Tears glisten in his eyes as he listens to the words of hope. “Oh life, where can I find you?”
“All of us lost someone,” says Minhas, who is forty-eight. He lost his wife. Wiping his eyes, he says, “My wife was a teacher — she was so beautiful.”
Ayesha Akram is a student in the Master of Arts program at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism.
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