IRANIANS COPE WITH EMOTIONAL WOUNDS FROM EARTHQUAKE

BAM, Iran - Seven weeks after an earthquake killed 40,000 people here, Bam
has electricity, water, tents and enough to eat.

The struggle now is against despair.

"This is my daughter," said Reza Karagan, kneeling on a grave. "She
was 14. I buried her myself."

He added a bit of water to a mound of gray dust and kneaded the cement
that would become a headstone. At his feet lay the grave of his
brother and his brother's wife, whose house the girl, Marzieh, was
visiting when the brick roof fell in.

"This is the only thing I can do," Karagan said. "Every two or three
days I come here, wash the graves, talk to them and then go."

A few yards away, in the vast cemetery that holds half of the town, an
old woman sat on gravel weeping.

"This is my son," Fateme Khakzad said. "Maybe I should have gone with
him. It would have been much easier."

'Extraordinary' devastation

Nothing is easy in Bam for survivors of a catastrophe so apocalyptic
it rattles even professional aid workers who go from disaster to
disaster for a living.

"For people who've seen natural disasters, Bam is still a shock," said
Mark Malloch Brown, head of the U.N. Development Program, who toured
what he called the "extraordinary" devastation last week. Brown, whose
business is to look forward, found encouragement in the ways that
normal life was asserting itself amid the ruins.

Fruit stands and butcher shops have opened under plastic sheeting on
the city's traffic circles. Banks do business from pre-fabricated
buildings. And a pair of schools have opened in the space between the
tents that crowd every flat piece of ground in a city that still
exists largely as discrete pyramids of broken clay bricks.

But for the people inside the tents, life is defined by absence -- of
promised aid, of a bed and a child to tuck into it and, so far at
least, of a discernable future.

Soghra Jalazi is missing a memory. Carried overland to a regional
hospital for treatment of her own injuries, she went days without
knowing the whereabouts of her children or of her husband, who had
been flown to Tehran for severe head wounds.

"We were not here to bury our children," Jalazi said, at the mass
grave where another relative scrawled the names of the 17 family
members on a bit of plywood. It stands in the new graveyard that
looked like an industrial site for the eight days it took to bury all
the dead here using backhoes and bulldozers.

Mass trauma

Most of it now resembles an ordinary Iranian cemetery. The low marble
headstones and distinctive tin memorial boxes were installed atop the
mass graves by relatives who located the approximate location of the
dead by flipping through thousands of digital snapshots taken just
before the bodies were lain side by side in open trenches.

One large section remains unmarked, the resting place for whole
households where no one survived to identify the dead.

"Sometimes we remember people," said Hassan Alizadeh, 48, a Bam
native. "We ask where he is or where she is. Then we suddenly realize
they must be in the mass graves."

The trauma is at once collective and intimate. Experts on disaster
recovery describe earthquakes as exceptionally disorienting for those
who survive them.

"It happens in your home," said Jan Kleijburg, a UNICEF official here.
"It happens incredibly suddenly. It has all the elements of being
really, really traumatic. It's really comparable to an atomic bomb.

"It's very important," he concluded, "to focus not only on this
disaster but also the social problems afterward."

In Bam, a small army of mental health counselors fans out to every
tent in the city, asking probing questions, inviting those deemed
"vulnerable" to attend regular group therapy sessions. The first
comfort for residents turns out to be taking turns telling what
happened in the quake.

"The only thing that comforts us is this is the suffering that
everyone in Bam is experiencing," Khakzad, the old woman who lost her
son, said through sniffles. "So we've got a common pain."

Another finding: Survivors' guilt emerges with profound frequency, the
counselors say. So does depression -- and, frequently, reliance on the
opium pipe to escape it.

"It has increased a lot," said Abbas Zamiad, a health official.

Long a nexus for drug smuggling routes from Pakistan and Afghanistan,
Bam had a stunning rate of opium consumption even before the
earthquake, with perhaps as much as a third of the adult population
addicted. Methadone was among the relief supplies that was rushed in
afterward, dispensed to injured residents experiencing withdrawal.

Numbing the pain

Bam residents tell of an ethnic Baluchi drug dealer who went from tent
to tent in the days after the quake asking if a drug addicts lived
there. If the answer was yes, he dropped a 5-gram ball of opium on the
canvas floor and moved on.

"He was just showing his sympathy," said Ehsan Sarhadi, one who
accepted the largesse. The self-described addict reclined on a stack
of blankets in the Red Crescent relief tent he shares with another
addict, a mustachioed young adult still working his way through the
stash he recovered from the evidence locker of Bam's police station,
where only a single officer survived.

"Maybe I can say I smoke for the pleasure of it, but the real reason
is we lost everything. It is a kind of escape," said Sarhadi, 21, who
said he had given up both opium and cigarettes before the quake. "It's
a relief. When you use it for three or four hours, you don't think
about anything else."

"Because all of us need to comfort ourselves," added Nasser Ajami, the
tent mate.

Counselors say they fear that despair will deepen in the months ahead.
Tents that are sweltering at midday in February will become
intolerable when the desert heat returns in earnest late next month.
And residents complain that they have seen little of the aid that
poured into Iran after television images of the devastation went out
the week after Christmas.

Relief workers say reality is difficult to pin down in a city where
even the population is a matter of confusion. While 74 foreign aid
agencies are working in Bam -- some running field hospitals, as a U.S.
disaster team did for two weeks -- almost all distribution is funneled
through Iran's opaque government. Residents repeat eyewitness accounts
of donated goods being sold in other parts of Iran. Low-level
government employees call reports of diversion credible.

"Our fellow workers around Iran gave five days of their salary to help
the schools in Bam. Where is it?" demanded a teacher at a girls school
where classes are held in the open air and teachers sit on overturned
milk crates. A half-dozen fellow teachers nodded agreement. "All the
people here are saying there's no help."

'It's just like hell'

A rumor widely repeated in Bam asserts that the earth shook at dawn on
Dec. 26 not from an earthquake but from an underground nuclear test
Iran's government somehow has managed to keep secret. The story
appears to have no factual foundation; even U.S. seismographs
identified a 6.7-magnitude earthquake, clearly a product of an abrupt
shift in nearby fault lines. But the rumor's currency in Bam
underscores the skepticism that greeted government promises here even
before the quake.

"If you are somewhere else in Iran, the state media tells you that the
government is doing a great job here," one counselor said. "In
reality, if you come to this place, it's just like hell and it gets
worse every day.

"Our therapies are useless if they see no sign of reconstruction," she
added. "We are giving them hope. And really, they have received no
help. We can see it in the tents."

Foreign aid workers said the situation bears monitoring but that
improvement may yet arrive. Officials report promises from two
automotive companies to renew hiring in the special industrial zone at
the edge of town that survived the quake with little damage.

The encouraging words had not reached Karagan at his daughter's grave.
He said found "only an empty building" when he reported for his old
job at an auto assembly plant after the quake.

"I can carry on for the next two or three weeks," he said. "After
that, I have no money.

"Maybe the real disaster is ahead of us."