PAKISTAN QUAKE Survivor camp is 'like hell'

The camp sprang up without sponsorship.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan -- Shortly after a cold rain had finally quit, German relief volunteer Waggas Sajid walked the muddy paths of this city's most disease-ridden tent camp for earthquake survivors. Picking his way through mounds of rotting garbage and excrement, he felt like a character in Dante's "Inferno."
"This place is like hell," said the 26-year-old paramedic from Frankfurt. "People are living together in squalor. Everyone is coughing and the babies get sicker every day. I cannot imagine how they will survive. Hell cannot be any worse than this."
Situated on the site of a destroyed government college, it's known as the Old Government Camp. The name is misleading, since neither the government nor any other relief group had anything to do with the impromptu compound until a team of German doctors stumbled upon it last month.
What they found was an unsightly collection of 350 tents and more than 2,000 people that sprang up on a dirt-caked cricket field days after October's magnitude 7.6 earthquake.
Although scores of camps housing tens of thousands of refugees in the city are run by the Pakistani government and domestic or foreign relief groups, Old Government Camp had no sponsor. People just began showing up there and erecting their hovels.