“As an aid worker over the past ten years, I have seen the loss of life, destruction and suffering caused by massive calamities such as cyclones in Burma and Bangladesh; earthquakes in Indonesia and Haiti and famine and cholera outbreaks across Africa.
But what I have experienced here in Pakistan is worse than anything I have ever seen before.
I gained a true understanding of the scale of the problem on my arrival when I flew from northern Pakistan down to Sindh province in the south of this huge country, where GOAL is working. If you consider that Sindh is twice the size of the Republic of Ireland and is 35 per cent underwater, it brings home just part of what we are trying to deal with.
As the plane started to descend into Sindh, instead of seeing land, all I could see was water. That shocked me.
It was just as if I was flying over the Irish Sea before landing at Dublin airport. You could see the top of the odd tree, but that was all. No houses, no fields, no roads, just nothing until we came into the city.
The human side of this disaster is immense. Some horrific and extremely upsetting things have taken place right in front of me here over the past few days.
We went on assignment in the Shikarpur district in the north of Sindh province the other day. The further north we travelled, the less people we saw until the road fully submerged into the floods and we could travel no further. At this point the area was practically deserted.
On the way back, we came across a young woman lying in the sun by the side of the road. She was cradling a baby in her arms that I’m guessing could only have been a few hours old. They were both alive, but clearly traumatised.
That was a distressing sight, but this woman was one of the lucky ones as she was spotted and helped. Sadly people are finding themselves in similar situations all over Pakistan right now.
It is sometimes hard to fathom what families are going through here. Aside from losing their homes and all their possessions, some of them have had to endure some of the most painful episodes imaginable, as I was witness to last weekend.
We visited a small village, again in Shikarpur District. What I saw there was something that I won’t forget for a long, long time. A little girl drowned right in front of me and there was nothing I could do about it.
Along with many of her fellow villagers, she had been caught in the flood waters and was trying to swim to the river bank. Men and women were crawling out of the water in front of me but she just wasn’t strong enough and she lost her battle. She was there one minute and the next she was gone.
All this was happening amidst the screams and cries from her family who were trying to reach her from the bank. They turned to me, but like them, I was helpless. As people’s houses and possessions disappeared in the flood and the waters began to rise, we had no option but to get out of the area as fast as possible.
It is undoubtedly the worst disaster I have ever experienced. There are two main reasons for this.
Firstly, almost three weeks on, it is still an emergency situation. The 2004 Tsunami killed over 225,000 people in two or three minutes. The earthquake in Haiti earlier this year took just 37 seconds to kill approximately 230,000 people.
While both of these disasters were catastrophic, they lasted a very short period of time and almost immediately we were dealing with the aftermath and responding to those who had been affected.
In this instance, the crisis is ongoing, and it will continue for at least another two weeks. New areas will be flooded and more people will be affected.
The second reason is the sheer scale of the problem. When you look at the figures, three million people were affected in both the Pakistan and Haiti earthquakes, while approximately five million people were affected across at least 10 countries in the 2004 tsunami.
These floods have affected 20 million people in one country alone.
The numbers of deaths are not high in comparison to other disasters, but they are expected to rise once the waters recede and we get a better understanding of the damage caused. And this is before we even begin to talk about inevitable disease outbreaks.
As it is, I have rarely seen people as distressed as those men, women and children that I have come across since my arrival. Everywhere you go people besiege you for some form of help, whether it is water, food, shelter, or medical aid.
We have to assess the situation before we stop the vehicle in an area as people have surrounded the car on a number of occasions out of pure desperation.
In the meantime, we are doing what we can to help people and provide aid to as many of the most beleaguered people as possible.
GOAL is doing its best, but we need people to support us and help us to reach even more people.
I know that when I put my head down tonight, there will be people all over Pakistan trying to survive on the banks of rivers, not knowing where to go or what to do.
They will have no idea whether the river they are living beside will flood, and if so, when it will happen. Already, we have heard countless cases of rivers bursting their banks at three of four in the morning and flooding communities, putting houses under water in a matter of hours and destroying lives.
All you can do is pray that these people make it to the morning.”
© 2010 The Irish Examiner
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