Rebuilding lives not easy for Pakistani flood survivors (News Feature)

By Nadeem Sarwar Sep 2, 2010, 13:54 GMT

Hisar Dhairi, Pakistan - Haider Ali returned to his home one month after floodwaters swamped it, but he could find only two things intact among the rubble - a traditional matted bed and a clay pot in which his 16-year-old sister used to save her pocket money before the roaring waters swallowed her.

'My sister is dead. We are still mourning her, and now look here - everything is destroyed,' said Ali as he sifted through a heap of mud and wood that was once his home at Hisar Dhairi, a village in the Charsadda district of northwestern Pakistan's Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.

'How can I restart my life?' he asked. 'How will I feed my three children and wife?'

Ali, like most of Hisar Dhairi's residents, is a farmworker with no land of his own. He labours at the farm of a landlord, sharing 50 per cent of the costs and profits from its crops.

'Our sugarcane crop is gone,' Ali said, pointing at the plants that had started to decay in the nearby mud-covered fields. 'My whole investment is gone. The landlord can survive because he has lot of money and property, but I cannot since I lost everything I had.'

Even if Ali had the money to invest with the landlord, the land would not be ready for cultivation for two to three years because it is now covered by 1.2 to 1.5 metres of silt.

The deadly waters devastated the north-western region and later spread to central and southern Pakistan, submerging thousands of villages.

According to the United Nations, the floods have ravaged an area of at least 160,000 square kilometres - larger than the surface area of England - affected more than 18 million people, destroyed about 200,000 houses and killed more than 1,700 people.

The restoration of livelihoods and rehabilitation of affected people would require billions of dollars, a massive amount of money that a poor country like Pakistan cannot generate from its own resources.

Survivors like Ali can only live, at least for now, on aid from the government, international organizations and philanthropists.

But aid workers are having difficulty bringing aid to the survivors, given the massive scale of the disaster and slow response from the international community.

'Given the number of those in need, this is a humanitarian operation of unprecedented scale,' said Manuel Bessler, head of the UN's Office of Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs.

'We need to reach at least 8 million people [for immediate assistance], from the Karakoram Mountain Range in the north to the Arabian Sea in the south,' he said.

Given the slow distribution of aid, living day to day is becoming difficult for Ali and his neighbours at relief camps, let alone planning for their futures.

'The government has not helped us,' said Imdad Khan, a neighbour of Ali. 'Sometimes, some foreign aid organizations come with rations, but as soon as they leave, the police come and take all the aid with them for their families.'

Both are living at the Hisar relief camp, set up by the government about 2 kilometres from Hisar Dhairi.

Supplies do not come there every day. But when they do, survivors are lined up in the morning to get flour, edible oil, tea, clean water, blankets, mats, buckets, mosquito nets, soap and clothes. Supplies run out, however, before a man in the middle of the queue reaches the counter.

Amad-ud-Din, a 42-year-old farmer, moved into the camp, which provides shelter to about 1,000 families, about a week ago with his family and two water buffalos.

'Only two days ago, we got some food for the cattle,' he said. 'They were starving to death. They [government officials] have no mercy for us, so how could they have any sympathy for these poor animals?'

'We can only pin our hopes on the international community, but it seems that it is as merciless as our government.'