Page 329 - James Caan - The Real Deal

32 · Kashmir

Where do you start? I’m a pretty resourceful guy, but I couldn’t
find any solutions. People had no means of earning money to pay
for any of the materials they needed to rebuild their homes. With
the local economy and the infrastructure wiped out, it just wasn’t
straightforward to work out how I could help. You couldn’t get
aid in and you couldn’t get the people out.
We had taken some water with us but no food, but I didn’t
really have an appetite anyway. Remarkably, we found a shack of
a hotel that was still standing and, because no one had any money
to pay for accommodation, there were still rooms available and we
checked in. I barely slept that night, in part because of the images
I couldn’t get out of my head, but also because of the cold.
In the morning I decided to try to find out how I could help. The
army had arrived in Muzaffarabad and were handing out tents and
taking a register of the survivors. I went to talk to the commander.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.
‘I live in London, but when I saw the news on TV I just had to
come here and see if I could help.’
‘We need more tents,’ he said.
At last! Something I could do! But where could I get tents from?
I called London on my mobile that – incredibly – still worked and
spoke to someone from my office.
‘Do me a favour, will you? Go on the internet and find me a
company that sells tents. They’ve got to be ones for winter, for
serious cold.’
They called back with a number and I was able to buy the
company’s entire stock. I then met a local MP and told him that I
was going to be sending 1000 tents and I needed someone on the
ground to collect and distribute them.
‘I’m going to ship 1000 tents over in your name,’ I told him. ‘Is
that OK? Will you collect them from the airport and make sure
they are distributed?’ Pakistan’s national airline, PIA, had said it
would put on a special flight from the UK taking aid from the

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