For some of the children caught up in Pakistan’s floods, the most frightening moment of their lives was the day before the water hit.
“People were scared and running everywhere. There were so many rumours,” said 11-year-old Mehboob, one of the millions of people who fled their homes in south Punjab. “We did not know where we would go or what we would do.”
His family travelled all day, piled into a tractor and trailer, to escape the floods which swept down from the north four weeks ago and washed away his home that night.
Unlike the north-west, where most of the estimated 1 600 people who died were killed, south Punjab had warning of the coming floods — enough for most of its villagers to escape, but not enough to carry their belongings with them.
Nor indeed for the children to escape the trauma of fleeing in panic.
“On the loudspeakers in the mosques, they were saying ‘there is water coming, you should all leave'”, said 10-year-old Rukhsar, who like Mehboob now spends her days in a centre run by Unicef and other charities in the village of Kot Addu.
“I thought we were all going to drown,” she adds.
On the wall is a picture in black crayon drawn by an older student, showing a small house floating away on giant waves. Big raindrops fall from clouds above.
“We put that picture up to encourage them to speak, because when the children first came here the trauma was too great for them to talk about it,” explains an assistant.
Of the 20-million people affected by floods, children are the most at risk. Even ordinary illnesses like chicken pox and measles spread rapidly among children crammed together in camps. On top of that they face dysentery from contaminated water, malaria and skin infections.
The lucky ones
The children in this centre are among the lucky ones. They have been given food and medicine; they have been cleaned up and have somewhere to go during the day.
Elsewhere in south Punjab, Reuters reporters have seen mothers and children crowded together in hospitals and makeshift clinics.
In one school building in another district of the region, several children sat together with their mothers on one hospital bed alongside a baby hooked up to an IV drip — and that in a room which also doubled up as a crowded out-patient clinic.
Yet even the children in the day centre are trapped between the nightmare of the slowly receding floods and an uncertain future — their family homes destroyed and farmland submerged.
“These children are showing in their eyes a trauma I have seldom seen before,” says Anthony Lake, executive director of Unicef, after a visit to the school.
He added that he had noticed that pictures drawn by young girls often showed their dolls who had been left behind.
Mehboob, whose family has just returned to the area, has been back to see where his house once stood. Nothing remains.
“We are very sad and my mother cried. My elders tell me this is the will of God; these things happen, what can we do?” he says. “We are still scared of the water, but if our home is rebuilt, we want to go back home.”
Rukhsar’s family has already gone back to their house. The roof and one of the walls have fallen down but the rest has survived. “Our house can fall down any minute but we have nowhere else to go,” she said. – Reuters