Pakistani flood victims haunted by nightmares (Feature)

By Sajjad Malik Aug 19, 2010, 11:11 GMT

Essa Khel, Pakistan - Amjad Khan, a secondary school pupil, used to dream of becoming a doctor before floodwaters ravaged his house and family.

Now, living in a temporary relief camp in Tarug Sharif in the central province of Punjab, he is mostly visited by nightmares in which he struggles against rising waves of the mighty Indus River.

Amjad was enjoying a serene life before those floodwaters knocked at his door, forcing him to flee his home with his parents and four siblings.

'I have never experienced anything like this because we suddenly became poor,' Amjad, 15, said.

'My school is around seven kilometres from my house, and I happily walked everyday as I want to become a doctor and serve the people of my area,' he said. But now, that school is also swamped by floodwaters.

His father, Mehr Khan, sitting next to the teenager with a younger son on his lap, interrupted: 'Amjad is a good student, and his teacher told me that he will become something.'

The son sitting in his lap, looking anxious after the family's dislocation, started crying.

But the elder Khan, 48, continued as the topic of discussion veered from Amjad's future to the pressing issue of floods and displacement, saying he has never seen floods like those that began three weeks ago in Pakistan.

'The flood was so sudden that we could not collect any belongings and just ran for our lives,' he said. 'The water reached up to our shoulders.'

The displaced family first lived in a school where local people provided them with food, and later, they shifted to a small hospital that was declared a relief camp by local authorities.

'The life here is miserable although we get food twice a day and a doctor is available in the hospital to provide medical help, but it is not like home,' Amjad said. 'And I also cannot go to school.'

He is not the only one whose life changed from prosperity to penury in minutes as the worst floods in Pakistan's history submerged one-fifth of the country and affected more than 20 million people.

The area in which the Khans live is not only ravaged by the rising Indus but also near-daily flash flooding from rains in the mountains of the nearby Kohat district in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.

In Tarug Sharif, a thriving area of more than 30,000 people in the Mianwali district, at least 12,000 have been forced to abandon their houses because of the floods.

'Water suddenly comes roaring in every other day and engulfs everything,' said Noor Muhammad, who lives in the same camp as the Khans. 'People call each other to run for their lives, and we race to climb trees or find higher ground.'

Down on the main road, which connects Essa Khel with Mianwali city, 70 kilometres to the east, comes the constant roar of a road-clearing machine.

'I have been doing it [clearing mud from the road] for two weeks,' driver Sakhi Jan said, 'but the floods come again, bringing a lot of mud from the mountains and depositing it on the road.'

Local and foreign aid groups have yet to visit the area, leaving its residents to seek help from a religious charity suspected of being involved in the 2008 terrorist attack on the Indian financial hub of Mumbai, which killed more than 160 people.

Abdullah Shams of the Falah-e Insaniyat (Welfare of Humanity) Foundation, which emerged when the Jamaat-ud-Dawa organization was banned after the Mumbai attack, said his charity was providing two meals a day and medical assistance to all those affected by the floods in the Mianwali district.

One flood victim nodded in the affirmative. The man, who identified himself only as Akbar, said that after Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif visited the district, 'They [Falah-e Insaniyat volunteers] are the only people helping us.'

Tariq Niazi, the district head of the charity, rejected the impression that the charity was linked to extremists.

'Do we look like militants?' he asked. 'Aren't we normal people like you are?'