Homepage Feature

Pakistan relief camps ‘overwhelmed’

Audio: Play | Download

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Floods in Pakistan continue to devastate the country. Millions of Pakistanis now have no shelter or sanitation. And doctors in the worst-affected areas seem overwhelmed. Today, the UN refugee agency issued a new warning for Shahdadkot in the southern province of Sindh. Flood water there is pouring out of breaches in canals and threatens to submerge parts of the town. The BBC’s Jill McGivering is in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. Download MP3

• BBC coverage
• India helps in flood disaster

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World. Floods in Pakistan continue to devastate the country. Millions of Pakistanis now have no shelter or sanitation. And doctors in the worst-affected areas seem overwhelmed. Today, the UN refugee agency issued a new warning for Shahdadkot in the southern province of Sindh. Flood water there is pouring out of breaches in canals and threatens to submerge parts of the town. The BBC’s Jill McGivering is in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. Jill, you were in Shahdadkot, so what was the situation like?

JILL MCGIVERING:  When I was there it was really chaotic. I don’t know if it’s got any better now, but it sounds as if the embankment is starting to be breached there. Again I suspect there will be quite a lot of panic there. The embankment is itself only about three or four feet above the road and on the far side of it there is this vast sea of water where the river Indus has burst its banks. So, across all that area water as far as the eye can see, all you can tell that isn’t water are little eddies and flows where roads or rooftops used to be and occasionally a treetop sticking out above the waterline. So it is an incredible weight of water that is pressing on this mud and stone embankment and basically that is the cities last defense against the water. If that breaches in a major way, then it’s very likely the city will be flooded.

WERMAN:  Now, President Asif Ali Zardari said today it will take at least three years for the country to recover. Does that seem realistic?

MCGIVERING: It certainly seems that it would be at least that time. It is extraordinary travelling around to see how much of the infrastructure is damaged. And of course how much of the country is affected by this. They’re talking about something like a fifth of the country being underwater. And as you know, millions of people now affected. But where the waters are starting to recede in the more northern, northwest part of the country, we’ve started to get a sense of the extant of the damage and it does look dramatic. I mean roads, bridges, house being swept away. So there are whole layers of need. There are going to be people who need immediate help right now. They need food, they need water, they need shelter. In the longer term, they’re going to need help in terms of rebuilding their houses, in terms of getting their livestock replaced. Most of them, of course now, have lost their crops and also that’s a tremendous problem for Pakistan as a whole in terms of the government spending. But there’s also this issue that they depend on cotton and cotton related product for about two-thirds of their exports. Now, the cotton crop was in the fields when the flood started. An awful lot of it now has been lost. So they’re being hit every which way.

WERMAN: I mean the government has to be counting on a great deal of patience on the part of the Pakistani people. I mean they’re facing dire live-changing conditions and we’re talking 20 million Pakistanis displaced into scenes of chaos and disaster. How much patience do you think they have?

MCGIVERING: People who are caught up in the throes of it, who are desperate, who are by the roadside with no shelter, their children are hungry, they don’t have clean water, they’re not sitting around discussing who is to blame. They are saying please help us. They’re pleading. When you stop and go and talk to them, they are very emotional, very distressing. “Please have you come with aid? Can you help us?” But there are other people who are saying, you know, maybe the government should have been better prepared. Maybe this is showing up weakness and the fact that this government really is quite ineffective.

WERMAN: And it was precisely the average person affected by this disaster on the side of the road that you encountered. A mother and a very new baby.

MCGIVERING: Yes, she had walked 60 kilometers very heavily pregnant. Just about to give birth. That in itself was extraordinary. Then she was by the roadside, she had no shelter, she was just sitting on a straw mat someone had given her, under a tree, and she gave birth five days before I met her to a little girl. That little girl when I saw her on day five, well she wasn’t taking breast milk, so basically she was getting no nourishment at all. I then went across the road to try and find a medical camp and chat to some doctors there to say is there anything you can do, can you come and see this baby, can you save its life, because I really felt if they didn’t, it wasn’t going to last much longer. And they said, look, we’re overwhelmed. We’re doing the best we can, but we’re barely coping. There is so much need. But I found out later they did go back that evening. They did treat the little girl and when I saw the mom again the next day, I went to check up on how they were doing, I was delighted to see that not only was the little girl still alive, but she was looking much better, much more responsive and starting to feed. So I felt at least there, there was one story that gave me a little bit of hope. But it illustrated that if you get sick in this area, there is very little support for you at the moment.

WERMAN: The BBC’s Jill McGivering in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. Thank you so much, Jill.

MCGIVERING: Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.