Jannah Soorjo was forced to give birth in a sprawling Muslim graveyard in southern Pakistan filled with hundreds of thousands of flood victims, a reminder of the pain and despair gripping the country even as the floodwaters begin to flow out to sea.
Jannah Soorjo was forced to give birth in a sprawling Muslim graveyard in southern Pakistan filled with hundreds of thousands of flood victims, a reminder of the pain and despair gripping the country even as the floodwaters begin to flow out to sea.
The feverish 26-year-old mother is one of 500,000 women affected by the floods whom the UN expects will give birth in the next six months. Many of their children will enter a world where food and water are scarce and the risk of deadly disease is high.
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"I gave birth to this baby, but how can I arrange food for him here," Soorjo said, cradling her newborn son on yesterday. "He seems to be sick, and we don't have money for his treatment." Soorjo fled to the cemetery on top of a hill in Makli four days ago to escape the floodwaters, which inundated dozens of villages and towns in her southern Sindh province.
The floods began over a month ago in the northwest after extremely heavy monsoon rains and surged south along the Indus River. The floodwaters finally started emptying into the Arabian Sea yesterday, hours after swallowing the two final towns in its path, both of which had been evacuated, said disaster management official Hadi Bakhsh. But the challenges of delivering emergency aid to 8 million people remained.
"The situation is extremely critical," said Josette Sheeran, the head of the World Food Programme, after touring flood-stricken areas with other top UN officials. Her agency has managed to deliver food to three million people, but another three million require food aid, and that number could grow as authorities assess the damage the floods have done in the south, said Sheeran.
While the UN's children's agency has delivered fresh water to two million people, it still needs to reach six million more, and aid workers have only managed to vaccinate 10 to 15 per cent of the children in need, said UNICEF director Anthony Lake.
He warned that without quick action the country was headed toward a second wave of tragedy marked by outbreaks of cholera and waterborne disease. "This is likely to get much worse," said Lake during a joint news conference with other UN officials in Islamabad.
The scale of the disaster has raised concerns about the stability of nuclear-armed Pakistan, which is already reeling from Al-Qaeda and Taliban violence and massive economic woes. Foreign countries have pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to help Pakistan respond to the floods.
Even the country's archenemy, India, has offered assistance and announced on Tuesday that it was increasing its aid from USD 5 million to USD 25 million.
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