Pakistan: in some regions, aid is struggling to arrive as floods still threaten
Families have taken refuge in tents in Shikarpur, Sindh, after the floods.
AP - Fareed Khan
Text by: RFI Follow
2 mins
After the floods that have hit Pakistan since mid-June due to an exceptional monsoon, 6.4 million people are in urgent need of humanitarian aid, warns the WHO.
A climatic disaster whose consequences must still be feared because several areas are still threatened with imminent flooding due to flooding rivers.
This is the case in Sind, where thousands of people live in emergency camps where aid has not yet arrived.
Advertising
Read more
With our special correspondent in Dadu,
Sonia Ghezali
The road leading to Dadu, in southern Pakistan, is flooded in places.
The district can be overwhelmed at any moment, hundreds of people live in camps in the city center, on the banks, along the roads.
Zameer Hussain stretched a tarp held by two wooden stakes over a traditional wooden bed.
His wife is crouched a few feet away from a saucepan set on bricks in a circle around a fire of twigs.
“
This is where we sleep.
That's our kitchen,
explains this daily worker.
My house was flooded.
There are mosquitoes.
They bite us day and night.
We are afraid of catching malaria.
We asked the government for a tent, but they didn't give it to us.
There are also scorpions here.
Two children were bitten.
I have been here for ten days.
Nobody helps us.
People come, observe us and they leave.
»
► To read also: Pakistan: after the floods, the difficulty of setting up humanitarian aid
A few meters away, Rukhsana sits on a plastic mat with her eleven children.
All are barefoot.
They couldn't take anything with them when they fled their flooded house.
“
I have no food, we have nothing to eat.
We have to beg, my granddaughter went to beg on the street today
,” she says.
“
We need tents, food, medicine
”
Fayaz Ehman fled his village under water for a week.
He's angry.
"
Several countries have announced that they are sending aid to Pakistan, but we haven't received anything,
" he says impatiently.
We need tents, food, medicine.
I think it's a failure of the government.
»
► To read also: Floods in Pakistan: in Nowshera, survivors fight to survive
In some places, the authorities try to distribute bags of food rations but often give up, overwhelmed by the degenerating crowds.
Hundreds of thousands of people are still homeless as the monsoon season ends and winter is on the horizon.
A third of Pakistan, the equivalent of the area of the United Kingdom, is under water, after several months of record monsoon rains, which claimed 1,300 lives and destroyed homes, businesses, roads and bridges.
Newsletter
Receive all the international news directly in your mailbox
I subscribe
Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application
google-play-badge_EN
Pakistan
Natural disasters
Humanitarian
On the same subject
Pakistan floods: UN urgently appeals for $160 million donations
Reportage
A third of Pakistan under water, hospitals on the front line
International reporting
Pakistan: after the floods, the difficulty of setting up humanitarian aid