Pakistan floods: 'The worst is yet to come'

Two women from Islamabad, who decided to put their personal lives on hold in order to help Pakistani flood victims, describe the areas they visited and what they did there.

Noor Aftab, former head of investments and treasury at First Women Bank

"It wasn't even a matter of choice. The only thing I could do was to go to the affected areas and try to help people there.

I am a board member of the Shahina Aftab Foundation, which primarily works on women income generation programmes. Once the flood happened, our focus shifted to flood relief. We created a crisis cell here in Islamabad and we started calling donors.

The area we are working is Nowshera and Risalaur in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, which was first affected by the floods.

We sent our first team there and the reports we got back made us even more determined. They witnessed people clinging to electric wire, they saw human and animal bodies in the water, they saw people drinking that water. They saw 3,000 women stuck on roof tops with clothes torn - these are women who cover themselves from head to toe.

When I went there we had limited supplies and we selected about 12,500 women to give it to. Some women hadn't seen food for days. They weren't acting rationally. They were pushing everyone else to get their hands on something to eat. They thought this was their last chance of survival.

We could either help a larger number of people, but only for the basics for a short period of time, or select a smaller number of people and work with them not just for their immediate needs, but towards their longer-term rehabilitation.

Millions of Pakistanis have been displaced by the floods We chose the second approach. We are now helping 6,000 people in Nowshera and Risalaur, but we have set a much higher target. The army is housing them in schools. But that's where the job of the army stops and our job starts. We want to help women in particular, create income generating projects for them and provide them with doctors and psychotherapists.

There was a woman who had a strange behaviour - I was told by people who knew her that the flood waters took her three children in front of her. Their bodies were found later. I saw children who were so traumatised that they wouldn't respond to you.

Some people have lost relatives, but everybody has lost their home.

Every time we send relief items, there was a sticker on them with our contact details. I gave my mobile phone and I am now constantly getting distress calls from various different locations telling us where people are stranded and in urgent need of help. Then we send a small team with supplies to those places.

I am horrified how many cases of acute diarrhoea there are. People in camps we visited have been wearing the same clothes and in come cases they haven't been able to wash their hands in ten days.

Women need sanitary kits. From all the calls we are getting - I think female sanitary items and dry milk for the babies are most needed.

We are using social media actively to reach people. We have a Facebook page and we just got a large offer of money from India. The interesting things is that many individuals from India have come forward with their offer of help.

The amount of damage is colossal and we are grateful for anything we get. One if every five Pakistanis is affected and we may be wondering if our little bit makes a difference. It does, because it's all the hope they have."

FLOOD RELIEF IS HAPPENING IN PAKISTAN

by Talib Qizilbash

It is not really what we expected.

But that was a good thing.

A couple of friends and I visited flood-hit areas in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on August 14 and 15. We made arrangements with three different NGOs through which relief packages of food would be distributed to flood-affected families.

On August 14, we followed the team from Shahina Aftab Foundation (SAF) to Risalpur, just a few minutes away from Nowshera city. We had met the SAF management the night before in their Islamabad offices where we discussed the ground realities and the plan of action for Saturday’s work.

Nearby PAF Risalpur, in the Cantonment area, six schools had been converted into relief camps for flood-hit IDPs. The six schools housed approximately 6,000 people. One area had been specially allocated for about 221 Christians, said army officials. The military, who managed the camps, believed that this was best given it was Ramadan: this way non-Muslims were free to drink and eat without offending those who were fasting.

The army engineer corps there had already set up clean drinking water in the days before our arrival. Scores of bottles of water in the SAF office were now being saved for a future day: they were no longer a part of the food ration package for the Risalpur IDPs. This was proof of a common assertion made by relief workers around the country: in a crisis like this, conditions and needs change daily.

The relief package arranged through SAF was designed to feed a family of four for four days. That afternoon we were delivering 168 packages using a portion of the funds we raised. The rest of the funds were being allocated to other flood victims through different NGOs.

At Presentation Convent High School in Risalpur Cantonment the atmosphere was, remarkably, not gloomy or squalid. A special event had just wrapped up for Independence Day where small gifts had been distributed to the children there in an effort to “lift their spirits,” according to Colonel Salem Sajid, who greeted us and headed one of the army corps. A coloured tent still stood in the centre of the schoolyard even though staff were already picking up the chairs. The festivities were not over though. An army officer was reading out the names of registered families one by one over the sound system. And one by one family representatives were going up to a table to collect 1,000 rupees in aid. It wasn’t a lot, but it was something they could put towards their family when it would come time to leave the camp (see photo gallery below).

As absurd as it sounds, it’s fair to say that the IDPs here were the lucky ones. Many displaced people around the country were in camps with no running water, no toilets and nothing to cook on. If they were fortunate, they had a tent that didn’t leak and wasn’t being shared by multiple families.

At a camp in Charsadda, one volunteer relief worker told me that at first people were sleeping with their livestock in their tents, desperate to safeguard whatever they had left. And with no latrines and endless amounts of stagnant water the place was a stinking mess, ripe for diseases.

Here in Risalpur, many of the people came from nearby areas in Nowshera District. And in villages around Nowshera, the Kabul River – the Kabul River feeds into the Indus near Attock – had overflowed greatly: by some local accounts as much as 30 feet. Water marks on building walls showed that water flowed through some villages 12-15 feet above street level. Thus, as the water level rose, some houses eventually disappeared under the expanding river.

The military-run relief camps set up in the schools were nothing like what is shown on television. According to officers guiding us around the camp, 1,440 people were housed in Presentation Convent High School alone. Families lived in solid classrooms. The school building we entered was built a couple of feet off the ground. It was unlikely any minor flooding from heavy rains would inundate them. These IDPs had secure, non-leaking roofs over their heads, working toilets nearby and a medical clinic where both female and male doctors were accessible (though the clinic was not manned by both at all times, and when we visited, only a medical assistant was on duty, though the clinic had a healthy stock of medicine).

Most families fled their homes with very little. Some had bedding, others brought a few valuables. According to Colonel (retd) Aftab Alam of SAF, most didn’t have pots, stoves or any cooking utensils, so the army set up a kitchen to cook for the IDPs. All relief food packages were handed over directly to the army who cooked meals using the donated bags of rice, flour, ghee and daal.

Still, not everyone was happy. Our food packages were enough for only 672 people, and we didn’t have enough treats for all the kids – no parent likes to see their child left out, and they let us know. Moreover, there were a couple of people in the school who approached us and said they were not getting enough to eat. The army had a registration system for everyone in the camp, and rations were systematically being distributed to all, said the team from SAF. Nonethless, Mrs Shahina from SAF ensured us that they would look into the matter, even though the SAF team had seen the registration system and already visited all six schools in the area. They were confident that everyone was being looked after as best possible, but admitted that caring for 6,000 IDPs wasn’t simple and even the army was struggling with limited resources and was dependent on NGOs for support.

For now, these Pakistanis can take solace that they have had, at least, some of the best temporary relief. The army, partnering with relief organisations such as SAF, was doing a tremendous job providing safe and clean living conditions, meeting everyone’s basic needs. This is a view of the relief response that the media has failed to show. It was not what we expected. And in these times, meeting expectations, let alone exceeding them, is dismissed as an impossibility.