After a week in the foothills of the Karakoram Mountain range in the north of Pakistan – where winter is set to pound the millions of flood-affected people – the heat and ocean scent as I step off the plane in Karachi, the opposite end of the country, is a welcome contrast.
Karachi is the country’s largest city, a sprawling financial and cultural centre for the country and the Islamic world. For me, the bustling seaport was only a fleeting image from the window of the vehicle en route to visit the countryside of Sindh Province.
The devastating floods that began in July 2010 inundated one-fifth of Pakistan, affecting some 20 million people. Here, on the floodplains of the country, many parts remain submerged: homes, belongings and crops.
After six hours of driving as straight as an arrow, we turned north and wove our way through field upon field of sugarcane, interspersed with small towns of several hundred households. The road is elevated and remained untouched by the area’s bulging rivers; for a period it became home to thousands of peasants who work the land. Much of the sugarcane is brown and wilted, drowned by the floods. In some spots the crops are still in standing water, the soil unable to absorb the deluge.
“I haven’t seen anything like it in 63 years,” said an elderly man in the village of Mahboob Kahloro. “Some stayed in their homes and lived in the water, but most of us left before the waters covered everything. I went to family, but many took what they could to the road.”
In 1947, the fractious partition of British India led to the creation of Pakistan and in the process displaced more than 10 million people. The flooding of 2010 has caused similar confusion and displacement, clogging the roads with people who lost their homes. PWS&D partner, Church World Service – Pakistan/Afghanistan found many of the tired and hungry people of Mahboob Khaloro on these roads. With international support, they provided them with dry food rations for two months, along with cooking pans and hygiene products to tide them over until they could return home.
They waited two months for the waters to recede before returning to rebuild their destroyed mud homes, putting their children back in school and desperately planting the cracked and saturated land. In other areas of the province, many are still living in camps, waiting for the waters to recede from their communities and for a safe place to rebuild their lives.
The families of Mahboob Kahloro do not own their land, and must pay their wealthy landlord between 20 and 40 per cent of their wheat, cotton or sugarcane harvest every year. Sharecropping dominates the floodplains while landlords lead comfortable lifestyles in Karachi, living off the profits of this feudal agrarian economy.
Most families lost their entire cotton crop in the floods and have taken on loans to get through this crisis. Food aid helped them avoid starvation in the aftermath of the floods, but the race was on for these farmers to get wheat seed in the ground by the end of December. The few that have been able to get seed in the ground can only pray for a bountiful harvest.
Before bidding farewell to the people of Mahboob Kahloro, the village gathered round as my local colleagues and I removed our shoes and sat on an orange tarp to receive a deliciously sweet cup of tea and biscuits. This brief moment of sharing marks my last visit to a community in Pakistan before boarding a plane to Toronto, where a whirlwind of Christmas celebrations would likely keep the troubles of Pakistan far from most people’s minds.
Thankfully, some did remember, reaching out in prayer and support. In this new year of hope, I urge us to continue our solidarity and empathy while praying for those in Pakistan who struggled through a difficult and traumatic year.
