Thousands of people are searching for dry spots to take shelter as low-lying areas are being swallowed up by raging floodwaters across Pakistan. One such refuge is Pakistan's sole six-lane motorway, a symbol of pride for the poor nation struggling to achieve prosperity, but now illustrating the disaster the country is facing.
With small clusters of tents along the Islamabad-Peshawar section, both sides of the road are occupied by displaced families when it reaches Charsadda, one of the worst-hit districts in the north-western province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.
For 1 kilometre the traffic police have erected barriers to slow down vehicles. It is still dangerous as children play and cross over to see friends in makeshift tents on the other side of the motorway. The air is filled with the smell of human waste as an aid worker distributes cooked rice with spices and pulses from a large cooking pot transported from Peshawar, the provincial capital.
"We have no toilets here even though we are staying here for more than a week now," said Yar Mohammad 30, who is living with eight family members in a tent. "It is especially problematic in the night when our children go out to urinate in the dark. We are always scared that they might be bitten by a snake."
"Our government has provided us nothing. These people are a bunch of crooks that have come to power so they could fill their pockets," Mohammad said. Authorities are striving to get aid to the millions of victims of the worst floods in Pakistan's 63 years of independence. But the resources pale in relation to the scale of the devastation, which the United Nations says has surpassed the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in terms of people affected.
The world body was set to launch an appeal for international assistance of a 459 million dollars. "The response is good so far. We have received promises of 140 million dollars as of last night," Maurizio Giuliano, a UN spokesman in Pakistan, said. Many flood victims remain unhappy with the response from international aid organisations and the Pakistani government. "We are starving here. We get a meal here mostly once a day," said Karim Ullah, 40, a bus driver who is sharing one tent with two families - 16 people in total. "We need more tents," he said.
The UN's World Food Programme said on Wednesday that it had so far managed to reach 375,000 people, mainly in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and planned to raise the numbers to 2 million by August 20. That would leave 4 million, out of 6 million who need urgent assistance, without help from the programme. The Pakistani government is only nominally helping at the motorway relief camp. A doctor has visited twice in two days and handed out some tablets.
But that has been of little help for Amna, 4, who started to suffer from a skin disease at the camp. She was crying with pain, holding her leg. "The death toll is so far limited - less than 2,000 people have died. But if we don't act fast enough in terms of food, shelter and health, then there is a serious risk that many more people could die because of disease, because of malnutrition," Giuliano said. "We have to be fast if we want to prevent a second wave of death."
The floodwaters have poured into the Indus and other rivers after ravaging the north-western region, and were swamping large areas in the central province of Punjab and the southern province of Sindh, where more than 1 million have been evacuated. In Punjab, the country's bread basket, tens of thousands were on the move. Taking refuge in trees and on roads and railway tracks, they were fleeing to save their lives.
Nasrullah Jatoi moved to Muzaffargarh last week when his village was submerged. But he had to leave quickly when the authorities on Monday announced the evacuation of the city of more than 450,000.
Sitting in a relief camp in Multan, a metropolitan area with an estimated population of 4 million, Jatoi was concerned about the safety of his family. "It seems death is chasing us everywhere. How long we can dodge it?" he said. He has survived but many left behind may not manage to avoid the swelling floodwaters as the impoverished areas lack modern amenities like motorways where authorities could set up tents for the flood victims.
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