TRANSCRIPT
After the Deluge - Transcript
It began with heavy rain that turned into a rolling wall of water destroying everything in its path. Now reporter Liz Jackson retraces the progress of Pakistan's devastating floods. She meets the people whose lives have been forever altered; talks to key national leaders about what this means for the country; and asks what's next for the millions of people displaced by the water.
Reporter: Liz Jacksson
Date: 13/09/2010
LIZ JACKSON: In the last days preceding the torrential downpour in the north of Pakistan, the weather warnings were modest.
People could expect the annual monsoon system to deliver widespread and heavy rains for a week, but nobody predicted this.
A cloud burst over the northern part of the country that produced the torrents of water that stormed down the Indus River wreaking havoc all the way.
Over the coming days and weeks gushing and spreading as the floods moved down, into the flatlands of the south, sweeping all before it.
A flood that would devastate the country like no flood had ever done before. Both the national and international response was slow.
IMRAN KHAN, CHAIRMAN TEHREEK-E-INSAF PARTY, PAKISTAN: Even people like us did not know what was happening, because we thought it was just, a little area affected. And then gradually over a week you began to realise the number of people that were going to be affected, 20 million people.
KAREN ALLEN, UNICEF, PAKISTAN: Nobody knew we were going to go up to 17 million, no one. That was a gradually occurring phenomenon. You know every week it was no, no, it's not two million, it's six million. No, it's not six million, it's eight million, and then the third week, no, it's not eight million, it's 13, 14, 15, 17, so every week there was a growing sense of the scale.
LIZ JACKSON: For those not directly affected it was images on TV that brought it home.
SAMINA AHMED, INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP, PAKISTAN: It’s just the images of literally hundreds of miles of territory under water. Millions of people desperately seeking shelter. It was the enormity of the crisis, the magnitude. It hit home.
LIZ JACKSON: Tonight on Four Corners, `After the Deluge’.
It’s two weeks ago and we’re taking a US military chopper headed for the mountainous north-west part of Pakistan, back to where the devastation started.
The chopper is carrying thousands of kilograms of flood relief for villages who are still cut off by the total collapse of infrastructure up in the north.
800,000 people in the country still have no access to relief, other than by air.
MIKE O’BRIEN, INTL. COMMITEE RED CROSS, PAKISTAN: The bridges in upper and lower Deer which is a north western region up in the mountains, one of the more northern areas. There were 41 bridges in those two districts; every single one of them gone. There wasn't a single major bridge left in the Swat, in the Swat valley that people would have heard from the fighting last year that wasn't damaged.
LIZ JACKSON: We land in the fields at the edge of township of Kalam, high in the Swat Valley.
18 months ago the Swat Valley was Taliban territory, before the military crackdown, and it remains a tense and dangerous conflict zone. Millions of villagers were displaced by the fighting but had started to return to one of the prettiest places in the country.
Kalam was hoping to become again, a local tourist destination. There were shops and hotels all along this river bank before the floods came. All of them were swept away, including the Hotel Summer Queen, owned by Mohammed Roider.
MOHAMMED ROIDER: It was the night of the 27th July at 1:30am when water came into third floor of my hotel. We evacuated the hotel. After that the hotel started to collapse. I saw the hotel falling down in front of my eyes and you see it from here.
LIZ JACKSON: What have you left?
MOHAMMED ROIDER: Just my life is left. Just myself and my children saved.
LIZ JACKSON: Thousands of villagers from around this area are dependent on relief for basic food.
This old man has walked here from an outlying village ten kilometres away, and he’ll walk back three hours to four hours, each way. He got a ration card which gets him a sack of flour by working to rebuild the roads.
KHAN ZADA: It is tiring but we have no choice. We build the road down there and they give us a card to get some rations, so we’ve walked here to get the rations.
LIZ JACKSON: It’s the same story for all these men. Access to their villages is only by foot and food there is short.
KHAN ZADA: The flour has finished, the roads are blocked or swept away by the floods. There is nothing available there. Everyone knows we get our food rations here.
LIZ JACKSON: We can’t walk with the old men back to their villages. It’s just not safe.
A few days earlier the Taliban reportedly issued a threat to attack foreigners assisting the victims of the flood.
KAREN ALLEN: The security situation has certainly not improved. It's been bad there for the last couple of years. Humanitarian actors are severely limited in our access, so we're only able to send staff there for short periods of time and with plenty of time in advance for security to prepare for their protection. That's certainly limiting our response.
LIZ JACKSON: And what's the impact of that on the population?
KAREN ALLEN: The population doesn't get as much attention and they don't get it as fast.
MIKE O’BRIEN (in car): This is the outskirts of Peshawar off the motorway.
LIZ JACKSON: Mike O’Brien from the Red Cross is driving us out of the city of Peshawar.
We’re out of the Himalayas, but still in the northern province of Kyber Paktoonkwa.
We’re heading to a village on the road to Nowshera where homeless families struggle to survive. The lucky ones get a tent.
MIKE O'BRIEN: They're families who are really living on the, on the, on the fringe of being able to support themselves in the first place, and when something like this happens they're in all sorts of trouble.
LIZ JACKSON: Can you give us a sense of what sort of numbers we're talking about?
MIKE O’BRIEN: Each of the provinces gave different figures for the number of people who were displaced, houses destroyed. Yeah, here in um, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in the north-west, we were we were talking ah, in the early stages about 480,000 houses destroyed, um, and upwards of two million people displaced
LIZ JACKSON: We arrive at the village of Momin Gari where the Pakistan Red Crescent Society is setting up a clinic.
Over 400 hundred hospitals in the country have been damaged or destroyed by the floods, and so mobile clinics are trying to fill the gap. Trying to stem the flow of water born diseases and infections.
DR FARMANULLAH: Skins diseases, upper and lower respiratory tract infections, gastrointestinal infections, watery diarrhoea, bloody diarrhoea, and these are the main things.
LIZ JACKSON: Hayat Mir came for treatment for an infection in his eyes. His family lost their mud-built home in the floods. They now live in a tent. Hayat took us to his family compound to see what’s left.
YASMIN BIBI, MOTHER: So this was a mud house.
LIZ JACKSON (to Yasmin Bibi): Right where we’re standing?
LIZ JACKSON: All that remains of their five room home is a low wall of rubble. Yasmin Bibi is Hayat’s mother. The rest of his large family is clustering around.
YASMIN BIBI: We got no prior warning. The water came on us suddenly. We left our houses bare foot. We didn't even wear burqas, we just saved the children. We left everything in the house and the men said lets go. When we came back our houses were levelled to the ground. We put up a tent and now we are living in it.
LIZ JACKSON: There are 13 family members to share this tent. All their household possessions were damaged or destroyed. They now have just a few pots and pans.
They’ve lost their livelihood as well. The land they used to farm is under water.
YASMIN BIBI: The land is of no use, it’s under water. No longer ready for harvest.
YOUNG MAN: The crop is destroyed.
YASMIN BIBI: It’s all gone, destroyed
LIZ JACKSON: How will they live in the future?
YASMIN BIBI: All we hope is God will bless us with his generosity and rebuild our houses. What else we can think?
MIKE O’BRIEN: Most of these farmers are subsistence farmers. They borrow from the bank to get a crop in the ground. That crop provides them food for a year, enough to repay the loan, um, enough to sell to buy a few other essentials that they might have that they can't barter for, and seed for the following year. So um, all of these people are in debt, or the vast majority of them are, and the crops are gone.
LIZ JACKSON: By the second week of the monsoon rains, the floodwaters had surged down the bloated Indus River, south into the Punjab province.
We’re joining a relief run taking food to those still isolated by the flood.
The irony is tragic. The millions of acres of farming land drowning below us in a normal year make the Punjab the bread basket of the country.
This is how it feeds the majority of its people, this is where it earns its major export income.
What had begun as a humanitarian disaster has now become a national economic crisis and 8,200,000 people were directly affected, in the Punjab alone.
IMRAN KHAN: So suddenly you have found people, millions destitute. And I wonder I mean how it must feel suddenly to have lost everything and no way of earning an income, no roof over your head. And then a government which is totally incapable of dealing with this crisis.
MOSHARRAF ZAIDI, THE NEWS, PAKISTAN: All of the prime agricultural land has been, has been flooded, and so you just do some quick mathematics and we're looking at sort of losses that run into the tens of billions. There's all kinds of estimates out there and I'm not in a position to verify which one is good or which isn't. But I've heard 35 billion and I've heard 15 billion and these are just agricultural econ, economic losses owing to the floods.
LIZ JACKSON: We’re driving to the district of Muzzafargah, one of the worst affected regions in the Southern Punjab.
Thousands of displaced people who the indebted government is incapable of helping, have set up flimsy makeshift shelters. They perch on the edge of narrow levee banks or squat in the scorching sun by the side of the road.
International agencies and NGO’s are bringing in relief, but just last week Pakistan’s government conceded that over a million of its flood affected people have received no help at all.
In this climate the Foreign Minister accepts that Islamic extremists will try to step in and fill the vacuum.
LIZ JACKSON (to Shah Mahmood Qureshi): Do you have a concern that extremist groups will exploit that vulnerability and difficulty that the country faces to strengthen their position?
SHAH MAHMOOD QURESHI, FOREIGN MINISTER: They will want to ah, but ah, we have to ensure that we do not permit them to do so. We do not create a vacuum for them to fill in and that is why uh, I've been asking ah, for international help.
LIZ JACKSON: We’re on our way to meet one of the main Islamic groups causing concern, the Jamaat ud Dawa, to be shown their relief operations and to meet their local chief.
A Punjabi police unit insists on accompanying us. Desperate people in this district are getting impatient, and some of them are armed.
Jamaat ud Dawa is listed by the United Nations as a terrorist front group, widely linked to Lashkar-e-Tayyiba.
SAMINA AHMED, INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP, PAKISTAN: Most Australians should have heard of the Lashkar-e-Taiba. The Lashkar-e-Taiba was responsible for the attacks on the Indian parliament. The Lashkar-e-Taiba renamed as Jamaat-ud Dawa when it was banned. So in actual fact the Jamaat-ud Dawa is the same old Lashkar-e-Taiba that we see re-emerge in 2008 in Mumbai and I'm sure most Australians have seen the coverage of the attacks in Mumbai, because they were horrific.
LIZ JACKSON: My name is Liz Jackson from ABC TV Australia.
ABDULLAH OBAID: Yes, yes.
LIZ JACKSON: We’ve come to film your relief operations.
MAN IN GROUP: He’s a big man in FIF.
LIZ JACKSON: He’s a big man in FIF?
MAN IN GROUP: He’s Chief of Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation.
LIZ JACKSON: You are the chief of this organisation.
ABDULLAH OBAID: Yes, yes
LIZ JACKSON (voiceover): The Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation or FIF, is the latest renaming of Jamaat ud Dawa.
LIZ JACKSON: You take food and water in the boats?
ABDULLAH OBAID: Yes, yes
LIZ JACKSON: Prepared food.
ABDULLAH OBAID: Yes, Yes.
SAMINA AHMED: This is what happens repeatedly. These groups are banned. They change their name, they continue to operate, they're banned again, after another terror attack they change their name. So what's important is that the government should say, look, any group that's been banned under any name, if it re-emerges under any name, we're not going to allow it to operate. They need to put their foot down. But can they, is another issue.
LIZ JACKSON: We drive out following Jamuut ud Dawa along the edge of the saturated flood plains.
Underneath the water lies the ruined crops of cotton, lentils, corn and rice.
We pull up at a place which Jamaat ud Dawa uses as a relief distribution point.
There’s no question that they’re not operating openly with everybody’s knowledge. The military sends out boats from here as well.
A crowd of women have gathered, herded together underneath the JD flag.
They’re begging for food.
BEGGING WOMAN 1: Please give food, in the name of God. I haven’t eaten anything since I broke the fast. For God’s sake help us!
BEGGING WOMAN 2: We have small children over there near the water. We have tried everywhere. We don’t have any food. We are getting no help from the government.
BEGGING WOMAN 3: Our houses are destroyed, under water, they are destroyed.
LIZ JACKSON: The military tell us not to film the women. They say that they’re not genuine victims of the flood.
OFFICER: They are coming to us on a daily basis, and they are asking for food, otherwise, they are not actually the affected people. The affected people, you can see in front, just the camera on that side...
LIZ JACKSON: Jamaat ud Dawa is taking us to talk to the families to whom they’re delivering food
Out here are small islands of stranded villagers who’d rather stay marooned than live on the side of the road. They also want to protect what little the floods have left them.
The Punjab police insist on coming in the boat as well. There’s been looting out here they tell us, and robbery and murder.
SHAID NAEEM KHAN: Yes, murders have occurred and many robberies. Two people who stayed behind to protect their property were murdered and all their belongings were stolen.
LIZ JACKSON: How many families in this area are you assisting?
ABDULLAH OBAID: 150.
LIZ JACKSON: 150 families?
ABDULLAH OBAID: Yes, yes
LIZ JACKSON: Families?
ABDULLAH OBAID: Families.
LIZ JACKSON: The villagers tell us they were just tenant farmers. They’ve lost their crops and their animals, and most have lost their homes but Jamaat ud Dawa is helping.
MAN: Jamaat is giving us milk, rice, flour and other things...rations.
LIZ JACKSON: And you are grateful?
MAN: Yes we are.
LIZ JACKSON: Did you know Jamaat ud Dawa before they helped you? Did you know them before?
MAN: No, No, these people help us.
LIZ JACKSON: And what do you think of them now?
MAN: The only thing we know is that God has sent them to help us.
LIZ JACKSON: As we motor out, Abdullah Obaid volunteers how co-operative the Pakistan military have been.
ABDULLAH OBAID: The military are co-operating with us.
LIZ JACKSON: The military are cooperating with you?
ABDULLAH OBAID: With us. Yes, yes, yes. With the distributing of relief goods.
LIZ JACKSON: So you and the military cooperate to bring the relief goods to the people in this area?
ABDULLAH OBAID: In this area.
LIZ JACKSON: And there’s no hostility? No conflict?
ABDULLAH OBAID: No conflict at all. Our goods are safer with them, so we put them in their vehicles.
LIZ JACKSON: Heading for the next island, we can see the drowned cotton crop poking through the flood waters.
When we get there, it’s a familiar story, the army assists the villages, but also Jamaat ud Dawa.
MAN 1: The head of our village goes and gets the food from the army.
MAN 2: And Jamaat ud Dawa has been helping us by giving us vouchers and food two or three times. And they are very courageous people.
LIZ JACKSON: Did you know Jamaat ud Dawa before the flood?
MAN 1: No.
LIZ JACKSON: Are they doing a good job?
MAN 2: They are doing a good job. They are cooperating with us and come every day.
LIZ JACKSON: What do you think of the way the government has assisted?
MAN 1: Still nobody has come from the government, no members from the national assembly or anyone from the provincial government.
SAMINA AHMED: It's a repeat of the 2005 earthquake. That's exactly what happened then. They turned up, they set up relief camps, in fact alongside international camps set up by aid agencies as well as the military, and gained political support and gained recruits.
LIZ JACKSON: We’ve been taken back to Jamaat ud Dawa’s compound in the bowels of the city of Muzzafargah. At the gates there’s a cluster of people, clamouring for a handout. Inside is the hub of the JD’s food relief work for the district.
Volunteers are cooking up basic meals which will be trucked out to camps of flood-affected people in time for the breaking of the Ramadan fast at the end of the day.
They tell us they have fed 145,000 people in this district alone, since the floods arrived.
They deliver prepared food as families in the camps lost not just their homes, their pots and pans and cooking utensils were swept away as well.
It appears a well-organised operation. They’ve done this kind of work before. There’s no talk of the charity group FIF, the Chief tells us they’re all Jamaat ud Dawa.
LIZ JACKSON: Are all the people outside, the volunteers, are they all members of Jamat ud Dawa?
ABDULLAH OBAID: Yes, yes.
LIZ JACKSON: Are you getting many new volunteers after the floods?
ABDULLAH OBAID: Many people here are working as volunteers and new people have arrived after the flood.
LIZ JACKSON: Many new members?
ABDULLAH OBAID: Yes
LIZ JACKSON: You would be aware that the western media and Pakistani commentators say that one of your motives for doing the relief work is to recruit people for militant groups.
What’s your response?
ABDULLAH OBAID: No, there is no such thing. We are doing educational work inside the country, relief work and serving people, not doing any recruiting. We are also providing medical aid.
LIZ JACKSON: I have to ask you, people say your group is related, what is your relationship with Lashkar-e-Tayyiba?
ABDULLAH OBAID: Lashkar-e-Tayyiba is a freedom fighter group within Kashmir. What would be our connection be? Our work is in Pakistan.
LIZ JACKSON: So you’re saying no relationship?
ABDULLAH OBAID: No.
SAMINA AHMED: They have the same leadership, they have the same headquarters, they have the same you know agenda. How then are they different?
LIZ JACKSON (to Shah Mahmood Qureshi): Is there any concern in this country that extremist groups will use their relief work as a winning of hearts and minds exercise?
SHAH MAHMOOD QURESHI: They could have, they could have, but the response that has come, eh, through the massive national effort and the international support I think, ah, their designs if they were any, are subsumed.
LIZ JACKSON: Can I ask you specifically if Jamaat-ud Dawa's work is of any concern to your government?
SHAH MAHMOOD QURESHI: I think A, first of all, I think it's been exaggerated, ah, to a large extent, and B, look at the, look at the entire relief effort that is taking place. They're not a drop in the ocean.
SAMINA AHMED: But look at the image that they can create out of that presence and that assistance. And that is where the problem lies.
LIZ JACKSON: Four weeks after the deluge started, the floods have reached down into the southernmost province of Sindh. We’re flying on a relief mission out across flood plains as vast as the eye can see, and beyond. 20 per cent of Pakistan is now under water and in Sindh the waters are still rising.
In the past 36 hours, a further 200 thousand people have been forced to flee their homes, as their villages have been submerged. Those that remain live on narrow strips of high land and levee banks, cut off and dependent on food from the sky.
We’re dropping two tonnes of high energy biscuits but nowhere near enough for all. It’s first there, first served.
The Sindh we’re told is now the area of the greatest unmet need.
KAREN ALLEN: Almost certainly that's Sindh right now, the southern part of the country, because that, remember that's where all of these rivers that have been overflowing, they're all now dumping down into Sindh, and the water is just not draining. It's not flowing out into the ocean and it's not draining. So Sindh is really where we have yet to reach many millions in need of aid.
LIZ JACKSON: What's your immediate concern for the future?
KAREN ALLEN: Disease, followed by malnutrition.
LIZ JACKSON: We arrive at the city of Sukkur at night. It’s the third largest city in the Sindh. In a poor country, Sindh is the poorest province of all.
The road from the airport to the city is crammed with tenant farmers whose villages have been flooded and they’ve nowhere else to go. 100,000 of them have been moved into camps in the city, but there’s no room for all.
A further 60,000 are squatting with their children and their livestock wherever they can find a spot. There’s no system here for delivering relief.
MAN: We haven’t been given any food, clothes, milk, or groceries. I want to go back and rescue my brother and sisters, they’re trapped. They military hasn’t given them a boat.
LIZ JACKSON: Desperate for help, villagers show us their ID cards to prove they are genuine victims of the flood.
YOUNG MAN: I’m from Thul, in the Jacobabad district. My house, my land and my crops, my car were all destroyed.
MOSHARAFF ZAIDI: The asset base of these people, these sort of poor subsistence farmers, has been wiped out and their income generation capacity in terms of agriculture and livestock has also been wiped out. So these people are really sort of staring at the barrel of sort of total and utter poverty, unless massive sort of influx of aid comes through.
LIZ JACKSON: It’s morning time in Sukkur. Villagers herd the precious livestock they’ve managed to save down the streets of the city. More than a million perished in the floods.
Over the road there’s a long food queue for breakfast at a relief camp run by the Pakistani Air Force or PF. It’s chappati and dahl.
Over 2,000 people live in the camp. They get a basic cooked meal, three times a day, access to a medical clinic and a tent. They’ve lost all they possess, but in this desperate situation they are the lucky ones.
Every day the Camp manager tells us, he turns away thousands of people.
CAMP MANAGER: The people are coming day by day, thousand, a number of thousand people are coming. So those are approaching directly the PF camps because there is so many facilities and so the other camps are not properly looking after the peoples. So that’s why the people are approaching.
LIZ JACKSON: Why can’t you take them?
CAMP MANAGER: We have only, we have an area of more than 300.
LIZ JACKSON: So many do you turn away, every day?
CAMP MANAGER: Please, I told you no more questions.
LIZ JACKSON: No more questions about how many people can’t come inside?
CAMP MANAGER: No please, no more question, no more questions. I told you earlier no more questions. I’m only allowed permitted three questions. If you have any sort of questions, then contact with my boss.
LIZ JACKSON: The aid organisation Save the Children has come to the camp as well. Its priority is combating water borne infections and diseases in children.
This family’s youngest child, Navida, has sores that are becoming widespread in the camps.
CLAIRE SANFORD, SAVE THE CHILDREN: It’s quite common. It’s a skin infection that has been caused by children who have been in the water and have had contact with the contaminated water. We’ve seen a lot of these cases with this type of rash on the back, down the arms and on legs and the simplest way to treat it is with an antibiotic cream which has to be applied to the sores.
LIZ JACKSON: What is contaminating the water to that extent?
CLAIRE SANFORD: The dead animals, and obviously just the level of stagnation that’s been the water, it’s been there for a long period of time. And there’s a lot of livestock and dead animals that are in there at the moment.
LIZ JACKSON: Have you see this before?
CLAIRE SANFORD: We saw this yesterday in a couple cases as well in the schools. Not to this extent, but certainly you see sores around the face on the back of the arms and legs.
LIZ JACKSON: The family came from Jacobabad, an area that was completely engulfed. Over 400,000 people were made homeless.
MAJIDA HASSAN: Water was everywhere, the waves were too high, it was up to the height of the house. The houses were destroyed. As soon as the water came we run away.
LIZ JACKSON: Did you leave before the water came or did you...?
MAJIDA HASSAN: No, as the water came, we save our lives and just ran.
LIZ JACKSON: How did you get out, how did you leave?
MAJIDA HASSAN: We walked and then we got transport to here.
LIZ JACKSON: And what could you bring with you?
MAJIDA HASSAN: Nothing.
LIZ JACKSON: Along the edge of the camp is a large flat expanse of stagnant water. A place for women to wash. A place for children to play. A place to cool down in the searing heat and a breeding ground for disease.
CLAIRE SANFORD: Just the stillness and the stagnation in the water is a huge concern. These are a prime area for mosquitoes and obviously, with the mosquitoes comes malaria and that’s one of our biggest concern we have for the children in the camps.
LIZ JACKSON: Has there been any cases of malaria to date?
CLAIRE SANFORD: Across Sukkur it’s reported there’s been more than 10,000 cases of malaria. In this camp alone I’m not quite sure. And that’s one of the biggest concern for the children here.
LIZ JACKSON: The women are taking the water out from a pump, that’s presumably a good thing yes?
CLAIRE SANFORD: It is. It’s a deep tube well where the water is coming from. The water in theory is clean. But of course, our concern is when the children are drinking from the ponds by the side of us here. Children are swimming in the water and playing and obviously there is that potential for them to ingest the water.
LIZ JACKSON: What will happen, what’s the risk?
CLAIRE SANFORD: The biggest risk is diarrhoea, that’s one of the biggest risks.
LIZ JACKSON: How serious is it for a child to get diarrhoea in a camp like this?
CLAIRE SANFORD: In these conditions it’s very serious. We have got temperatures of 45 degrees, we’ve got children drinking water. If they have diarrhoea they lose more and more fluids and there is a potential for them to become severely dehydrated.
LIZ JACKSON: And what are the potential consequences?
CLAIRE SANFORD: Death is the simple consequence of severe dehydration.
KAREN ALLEN: There will be excess mortality. There is excess mortality going on now. I don't know the figure, but it will not be insignificant.
LIZ JACKSON: The GMC Hospital is the biggest hospital in Sukkur. This is where mothers from the camps and the roadside bring their sick babies.
The hospital now devotes four wards to treating just acute diarrhoea, with two or three babies in a bed.
Dr Abdul Memon is the chief paediatrician. 90 per cent of the cases he sees are infants and young children.
DR ABDUL MEMON: This is not the ward, actually this is the corridor. And we kept the bed here for the three children. You see three children, four children lying here, with diarrhoea and they come from Jacobabad.
LIZ JACKSON (to Dr Abdul Memon): Jacobabad, that’s one of the villages that’s completely flooded, isn’t it?
LIZ JACKSON: Four weeks ago there were five or ten diarrhoea cases a day. The day we came there were over a hundred children admitted before noon. Their mothers jostle in corridors to get the doctor to see their child.
DR ABDUL MEMON: These are all the patients who have just come now from outpatients. I have seen them. She’s seriously dehydrated, she’s having loose motions and vomiting. As well as you see, she’s one year old.
LIZ JACKSON: She is tiny?
DR ABDUL MEMON: She is seriously malnourished so it’s very difficult to manage these patients with diarrhoea and dehydration.
LIZ JACKSON: Did she come from one of the camps?
DR ABDUL MEMON: She came from far flung village of Khairpur district which is nearby to Sukkur district, that’s why they come here.
LIZ JACKSON: She’s come from the floods?
DR ABDUL MEMON: This baby is two year old, she’s also seriously malnourished and she’s having loose motions and vomiting, with distension of her abdomen. He’s the elder brother of this baby and he’s also having loose motions and vomiting and serious dehydration. She has come from Kathiababa. She has come from Khairpur with distension and now they are living in some camps.
She is also having serious dehydration, okay. They have come from Ghauspur, this is Kandkhor district, which was first affected in the Sindh. They are living in the camp.
LIZ JACKSON: First affected? And why are they all getting sick? Why are they all getting this...?
DR ABDUL MEMON: They are getting waterborne diseases and we can’t, how many patients can we treat in our hospital. They are coming with serious dehydrated, every day the quantity is increasing. Today we have 100 patients, 100 patients I have just discharged 10 or 15 patients downstairs and now here I will discharge 10 or 20 patients.
So we have to keep the beds for the new coming with serious dehydration. We only cover dehydration and then we give them medicine and they go back.
LIZ JACKSON: They can’t stay, there is no room?
DR ABDUL MEMON: How can the new coming people, how can we accommodate them? 100 patients...
LIZ JACKSON: Hundred patients every day?
DR ABDUL MEMON: So we recover them from dehydration and when they are hydrated we send them in 24(hours) back to their camp with the medicines. Majority of them. If some are sick, then we keep them here.
LIZ JACKSON: A child like this?
DR ABDUL MEMON: She will be kept here because she is very sick.
LIZ JACKSON: Is it possible to put a figure on what percentage of children in the camps are suffering from acute diarrhoea. Is it possible to put a percentage figure on that?
DR ABDUL MEMON: I think at least 20 percent of children are suffering, this is my guess.
LIZ JACKSON: This is your guess I understand that, I understand that.
DR ABDUL MEMON: Now we see the wards.
LIZ JACKSON: As the doctor stops to speak with a mother there’s a call of alarm. An infant we have just seen has stopped breathing in her mother’s arms.
The mother has slumped to the floor
DR ABDUL MEMON: Ok, ok quickly.
Sister, sister. Put the drip in quickly, give her some heart massage and take her to the ward.
LIZ JACKSON: For the next 20 minutes the doctor and the medical staff work to save the child. Putting in a drip, listening for her pulse, trying to restart her breathing. A heart massage on her tiny frame. This little girl is one year old.
DR ABDUL MEMON: She went in shock. I have given her emergency medicine, adrenalin fluid, and oxygen, now she is having the heart (beat) back, but we will try.
LIZ JACKSON: Do you think she will make it through, that she will survive. Is she in danger?
DR ABDUL MEMON: Yes, she is in danger.
LIZ JACKSON: There was only ever the smallest chance that the child Saira would make it. After 20 minutes the medical staff gave up the fight. Her mother carried her out of the ward alone, almost swept aside in the bustle of other cases still to attend to.
A stranger gives her mother water to wash and close her eyes. It’s over.
MAN’S VOICE (off camera): The baby’s eyes are open. Use water to close her eyes.
MOTHER (carrying child): I don’t have any water.
MAN’S VOICE (off camera): The water is there, wet your hand and put the water on her eyes.
MOTHER: Could I have some water please?
LIZ JACKSON (to Dr Abdul Memon): If nothing is done about the quality of the water, how many children do you worry about will die from dehydration, from gastro, from diarrhoea. Are you worried about that?
DR ABDUL MEMON: I can’t imagine, I can’t imagine, I can’t imagine how many. You see then they are already malnourished, when they have two or more episodes of diarrhoea, how can it (be) possible to them for survival. They will have to fight with the God then, to make them survive, there is no chance. So I can’t imagine how many deaths (we) may have.
SAMINA AHMED: The first deaths that have taken place have been of under fives, and it has been basically water borne diseases, the easiest to tackle. I mean this is, this is why it's so frustrating. Can you imagine that wash has only been met, I think, eh, it's about eh, 30 per cent of the bill has been met as yet? What's the problem? Corruption? Civil ineptitude? I'm sorry, it's indifference.
LIZ JACKSON: You think from the international community, it's indifference?
SAMINA AHMED: Well, I mean it's not an understanding that this is an immediate and urgent need.
KAREN ALLEN: The world was very slow to understand, not only the magnitude of the problem, but the scale and the amount of the damages and the devastation. So far we believe only 1,600 people were killed, perhaps that was the reason, but in terms of livelihoods lost, hope lost, access to health, food, shelter, the magnitude is bigger than the tsunami, the Haiti earthquake, the Pakistan earthquake, all put together.
LIZ JACKSON: Do you think it's anything to do with Pakistan's image and standing in the world community?
KAREN ALLEN: I've heard all sorts of theories that it might be that people said let Pakistan take care of the problem, that people in Europe were on summer leave. We really don’t know, as I said.
IMRAN KHAN: People reacted slowly because people were taken by surprise, that's one reason. Second, when people did realise it, they did not have faith in the Pakistani government. The credibility of the government is so low internationally and internally, within the country also people ah, refuse to give money to the government.
MOSHARAFF ZAIDI: This is not about paying Pakistan's bills. This is about looking at this tragedy and this catastrophe and this calamity as a calamity, as a humanitarian crisis, where you know, maybe just somewhere less than 20 million, but a significant number of human beings require food, shelter, clean water, medicine and clothes, and I think the world community should continue to give to the international NGOs and the local NGOs that they have some trust in, to sustain those people, to keep those people alive, to keep them from sickness.
LIZ JACKSON: The world community has given substantial aid to Pakistan. Thousands of tons of food, health and shelter facilities have been provided.
This is the Red Cross warehouse in Peshawar where they’re loading up their trucks to send out flood relief all through the night. But everyone knows that the aid provided by all the agencies falls far short of what is needed. The United Nations says by 35 per cent.
Millions have been left in need and the need is still rising. The floods continue to spread and the disease toll is mounting.
But the world has stopped watching and is tiring of giving. These are a resilient people but this load is too great for any people or country to bear.