Thousands made homeless by Pakistan's heavy rains

Thousands of people have been left homeless, losing crops and herds in the heavy rains that have triggered unprecedented floods in parts of Pakistan.

“I am fifty years old and I have never seen Kot Mithan flooded. I never even heard of it,” said Jam Bugho, a small-scale cotton grower. “Scrabbling knee-deep through the water carrying two of my nephews on my shoulders I have made out of the village along with my wife,” Bugho continued with an air of grief and resolve around him.

“Before we were leaving my son went to look for cows, just to see if he could manage to take a few with him, if not all, but he did not return. We decided not to wait for him and joined others,” he said, pointing to a number of people who had also been evacuated from their homes in central Pakistan.

Relief operations are underway in the country, where heavy rains have washed away 650,000 homes, destroyed 1.4m acres (557,000 hectares) of crop land and killed more than 10,000 cows. As many as 12 million people have been affected by the flooding.

“Is there any way to know what might have happened with my son? My buffalos, cows and my goats?” asked Bugho.

Mohammad Naeem, 27, spoke of his ordeal: "I have three small children, an ailing mother and a blind father. My wife is pregnant. There is water flowing where my home was. I have lost 20 acres of cotton crop and two acres of sugarcane. The water has swept away all the grain we had stored. I have lost my cows and goats too. So now we are here, in front of you, empty handed. Look at the sky above and the hovering clouds but I have no place to hide these small innocent children and old parents if it rains now.”

A few yards away from the green belt, where some of the people from Kot Mithan villages had taken refuge under the open cloudy sky, two Rescue 1122 ambulances rushed to the fuel station while a screeching sound alerted everyone around, including the children who, somehow, had fallen asleep.

Rescue teams told us they had urged many farmers to leave their farms and bring their families to safety, but they were reluctant to leave their crops when the harvest was so close.

“Five days ago we asked people to vacate the town but they did not. We asked them to shift their belongings at some safer place. Only a few of them did so, only a few. Most of them said that ‘we know the river, it can’t be so cruel, it won’t affect us’,” said Haq Nawaz, shift in-charge Rescue 1122 complaining of villagers’ non-cooperation with his team during rescue efforts.

"For a cultivator it is difficult to leave the land he has tilled with his sweat and blood,” one of the medical doctors responding to the crisis reasoned.

Dr Shaheen Sadiq, an employee of the district health department, in-charge of medical stall told that many children had fever, skin infections and rashes all over. “There are many diarrhea patients," she said.

Another stall was set up by the district government’s department of livestock and dairy development to cater for the health and food needs of animals.

Because of damage to the roads and high water levels, many aid agencies are scrambling to reach affected areas. Oxfam and its partners are attempting to reach the areas where they work to determine how they might be able to best help.

In Swat, amid the heavy rainfall, Oxfam and its partners distributed soap, mugs, drinking water, sanitary towels and shelter kits to more than 200 families.