JAFARABAD: The scene is one of total devastation.
Two months after the floods, all seven union councils of Gandakha - a tehsil of Jafarabad district - remain submerged in six to seven feet of water, bringing the lives of over 50,000 people to a standstill.
“The water level was as high as 17 feet. The watermark you see on that electric pole speaks for itself,” points out Ameer, the boatman who rowed me across the Gandakha town and village now only accessible via boat.
The tehsil is located at a distance of approximately 100 kilometres (km) from the district headquarters Dera Allah Yar and had remained cut off from the rest of the province for at least three weeks till flood waters receded from the main road.
Only four-by-four vehicles owned by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) or some wealthy locals have been able to reach flood victims. Public officials are yet to visit the area.
“Not a single official has made the effort to traverse these breached roads and visit the homeless,” says Mohammad Umar, correspondent for the local Daily Mashriq and a resident of the area.
No trace of settlement
Some refused to relocate to the tent villages set up by the government in Dera Allah Yar and Dera Murad Jamali and decided to pitch their tents on higher ground in Gandakha that now resembles an island. “This helps us guard our houses and also keep an eye on our land,” a rice farmer Aleem Baloch explains. He points towards the 14-acre land he works on and I nod in agreement, but all I can see is floodwaters around me. There is no trace of human settlement.
The gushing waters not only destroyed crops over thousands of acres but have leveled entire villages, schools, public offices and date palm trees as well.
‘Our Titanic’
“It was our like our Titanic,” Ameer recalls. “People were desperate to save their own lives, no one cared about loved ones that day.” He says he lost count of the people he rescued on his boat.
The floodwaters started moving towards Balochistan on August 6 with the breach in Tori bund in Sindh. However, it was the breach in the Saifullah Magsi canal in Sindh and the Kirthar Canal in Balochistan on the night of August 16 that submerged the town of Gandakha.
“It happened around 12:10 am. We could tell something was wrong, but before we could take any precautionary measure to stop the water, it was upon us,” said Mukhtiar Faqeer.
Faqeer lost three of his children, two girls and a boy, when the boat they were in capsized.
He has hardly found the time to mourn his loss as he struggles to feed the remaining members of his family who will soon die of starvation, he fears.
Not enough aid
Some aid is trickling in through local NGOs, but many believe that it will make no difference in the scale of misery that currently afflicts the people.
The provincial government, they say, is failing at its most elemental task: providing relief.
“If the government continues to ignore the plight of flood survivors, it will lead to further resentment,” predicts Mir Hasan Jamali, a former professor at the University of Balochistan.
However, Home Secretary Akbar Durrani defends his position by saying that due to the magnitude of the flood and limited resources, it is taking the government some time to reach out to the remote areas and that the victims “need to be more patient.”
But for the survivors who have already waited over a month hoping some relief might come their way, it is perhaps asking for too much.
Published in The Express Tribune, October 10th, 2010.
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