It is Aug. 14, Pakistan’s Independence Day. Images of the mass exodus across the Pakistan–India border 63 years ago are repeated today, as millions of people are on the move to escape what are being called the “super” floods. With few or no belongings, people travel on foot, carts, tractors, pick-up trucks, or however their means allow. Their homes, possessions, livestock and livelihoods that took a lifetime to build have been washed away within a matter of days. Scenes of desperation are all too vivid, leading to chaos at distribution sites or passing relief convoys; starvation is driving people to grab whatever they can to feed their hungry children. Besides the loss of roughly 1,600 lives, approximately 20 million people have been affected by the floods so far.
At the beginning of August, the country experienced unusually heavy monsoon rains that caused major rivers to overflow, resulting in massive flooding across four provinces. In Baluchistan, earlier flooding in June as a result of cyclone Phet compounded the damage. According to the UN, the number of people affected is more than the combined disasters of the 2004 tsunami, the 2005 Pakistan earthquake and the 2010 Haiti earthquake, in addition to the three million people displaced in 2009 due to the conflict in the northern areas of Pakistan. The scale of flooding is making relief efforts difficult; many people remain stranded due to severe damage to roads and bridges.
As a 50-year-old widow from Punda Balla Village, Mehr Nisar shared her account with the Church World Service-Pakistan/Afghanistan team, which is carrying out relief work supported by Presbyterian World Service and Development. She says, “I lost my husband in the earthquake, and I was living in a pre-fabricated shelter with my son after that. This has now been destroyed as half of the land under the shelter was washed away.”
CWS has been working in Pakistan for over 50 years; PWS&D has been committed to supporting not only emergency relief over the last six or seven years, but also helping us tackle long-term development challenges.
Prior to the floods, CWS and PWS&D were working on improving peoples’ access to nutritious, safe foods amongst some farming communities. The floods pose a major challenge to this work since more than 1.4-million acres of croplands were destroyed, as well as the year’s reserves that communities store for their own sustenance. So while the country struggles to cope with the immediate needs of the millions who have been displaced, combined efforts and commitments will need to focus on long-term development needs.
