Pakistan Mothers Cry for Children Missing in Floods

Khandar (News Today) - Bibi Gul sits in a makeshift camp in Pakistan feeding her seven-month-old son as the tears roll down her cheeks. When the monsoon downpour came, the waters swallowed up her house and two of her children. Without news of her son and daughter for days, she is distraught.

“The flood water suddenly emerged and swept everything away. Nothing has been left,” said Gul, from Malikabad, a village in Nowshera district. Her baby son Faraz is naked. Her husband, a carpenter, is out searching for their missing children, desperately scanning what land is not submerged.

“I didn’t have any time to bring clothes for my son,” she said, holding a fan in her hands in a vain attempt to generate a breeze in the stifling heat.

Her other children, five-year-old daughter Fiza and six-year-old son Hasan, are with her in a camp hastily erected by local businessmen near Khandar village.

“When the flood water hit our village, everybody tried to save his own life. I don’t know how our two children went missing,” she said.

“When we came out of our mud house it collapsed and all our livestock were trapped in the gushing water and died.” She spent the first night of the rain, last Thursday, on top of a hill close to her village.

Three times they tried to get into a government camp but it was too crowded. By Friday they arrived in Khandar, desperate for some relief. Now she is tormented by the heat, complaining about mosquitoes, the lack of electricity, the lack of drinking water.

Mosquito bites pockmark the faces of her children. Hasan waddled up to her in the camp, holding out an empty water bottle.

“Mother I feel thirsty, but there is no water in the camp,” he said as Gul tried to lull his younger sister to sleep during an interview with AFP.

Children were crying in the camp and Gul wondered what the future could hold when the family have lost everything they worked for.

“My husband worked for years to build our house but now there is nothing left. We did not manage to salvage anything except some clothes,” she said. Her 60-year-old mother Nasim Begum fears the worst.

“I’m afraid when I see clouds in the sky that rain may start again.” Hassan Jan, coordinator of another relief camp run by the military near Khandar, told AFP that about 30 people had visited the camp since Monday, searching for missing children and family members.

Sitting in the same camp as Gul, near the northwestern town of Nowshehra, Bushra Begum cradled her youngest son in her lap.

“He is one-year-old and ill,” she said softly.

She has not seen her other two children since the rain.

“The water started entering our house late on Thursday night and by 6:00 am it was all under water and we climbed on the roof to save ourselves.

“My two children went missing in the flooding and so far there is no trace of them,” she told AFP.

Source : kompas

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