Frightening corrections
By CARE
This is my last blog from Pakistan, at least for now. It has never been harder for me to leave, to go back home. This is due to many things.
A man is standing in front of his destroyed house in Charsadda (photo: CARE/Schwarz)
But mostly to the fact that I feel like I have not finished this job yet. However, there is work waiting for me in Germany. This disaster has taken an unprecedented scale and dynamic. Whatever the reasons, the numbers have been corrected upwards by the hour. One million, three, ten, fifteen – now 20 million people affected. Directly or indirectly or somehow affected. Huge amounts of water, running over people and animals, fields and housings, still causing immense destruction. Currently in the south, especially in Sindh. Megacities are immobilized with fear. Will there be an evacuation, yes or no? And it is far from over. The monsoon sticks to the calendar, and we are right in the middle of the second phase. Rainy season is rainy season, there is no way around it.
Numbers, Figures, People
The southern province of Punjab is Pakistan’s breadbasket. Whatever is planted and harvested here is not solely for the country’s population itself. When the harvest is good, Pakistan also exports rice. This year, nothing good can be expected, literally. Sindh Province, even more to the south, is currently being flooded by huge amounts of water. Dams are breaking, hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing. And this: The newspaper “The News” reports, that 200.000 tons of cereal have been wiped out by the floods. Half of it was designed for Afghanistan, the other half for Pakistan itself.
People are trying to keep their belongings with them. The water takes everything with it. (photo: CARE/Rauf)
I cannot even begin to understand this. It’s simply impossible. I have tried, but the numbers are just too much. What I can understand and grasp are the individual stories. These are the victims I have seen and spoken to, but most of all listened to. There is Balqis, pregnant with her first child, who does not know where and when she will give birth. There is the four-year-old boy, slowly breathing, lying on the wet floor. And his mother who does not even have the money to take a bus and bring him to a doctor. Or the old man who asks me: “Do you maybe have a pair of shoes for me?”
Zakaria is seven years old, lives in Nowshera and says he is hungry (photo: CARE/Schwarz)
Dignity and hopelessness, apathy and anger
Together with our local partners, CARE was able to help these people. Fast and efficiently. The mobile health clinics are touring around and the staff are working to their limits. Like everyone here on the ground. And everyone is fasting, of course, because of the Ramadan. These are the stories of a disaster of unprecedented proportions. This is why I am writing them down. But they are more than stories, they are fates. Just like the many people who have not been named, seen or reached yet. They may have lost their four chickens in the water and with them their life insurance. Or a cow, or a goat who gave milk for the babies.
I dearly cherish the people of Pakistan and they endure their fate with an impressive grace. Some of them are apathetic and hopeless, but those are few. More and more get angry, a feeling I can thoroughly understand. If you are not able to feed your own child but are free of guilt for the circumstances, you must get desperate and angry.
There were moments of shock for me while I was travelling to Multan or Muzaffargarh in the South or to Mardan or Charsadda up north. Now, with the water in the Northwest slowly receding, the destruction becomes visible. But how can those people build back their communities when they do not have enough to eat? How should they carry bricks or push barrows when they suffer from diarrhoea or cholera? The pictures from Pakistan are a cry for help to anyone who even remotely shares our common values. There is – at least for me – no excuse for not helping.
Remember the first CARE packages after the Second World War? Germany had just caused tremendous destruction and suffering in the world and killed millions of people. But the German people received help from the US and Canada. These countries put their doubts to rest because it was about human suffering. Like now in Pakistan. I will be coming back to this place. And then I will drink all the teas I have been offered by people in the flooded regions. Insh’Allah!
