From hope to home

For Mai Hoor, a young mother of two kids, the day was really special like Eid. After one year of homelessness, she was given possession of her newly-constructed house in village Dhodha taluka Kandiaro, district Naushahro Feroz, Sindh.

Village Dhodha was one of the badly affected villages, where majority of the houses either have been demolished completely or partially.

Hoor was not alone in her celebration, but twenty-nine other villagers were also among the lucky lot, who got their new homes which included the facilities of a kitchen, washroom, hand pump and a water storage tank. Expressing her jubilance while standing outside her new home, Hoor says, Today I am free of my worries,” says Hoor jubilantly, as she stands outside her house. “Worries that we have had since August 2022, when our homes were destroyed due to torrential rains and flood, rendering us homeless, are gone away at last. Our entire village was inundated by almost 5-foot-high water.”

She told her harrowing tale of losing most of their livestock such as buffaloes, cows and goats. “Even our hens died and we were

forced to leave our devastated homes and take shelter in the tent city set up near the Kandiaro bypass, where we lived for around one and half month,” she recounts.

According to Hoor, when the water receded, they returned back to their village and found debris all over, they broke into tears. “We used to look at the sky all day, as if someone will descend from heaven and come to our rescue,” she says. “After two days, a team of Riverside Development Organisation (RDO) with the financial support of Community Organised Relief Effort (CORE) visited our village and several other nearby villages and distributed dry ration, hygiene kits, mosquito nets for humans and animals, blankets, pillows and tents.”

The organisations also ran free medical camps from time to time to provide medical aid to the ailing at their doorstep. After raising all the streets of the village by three feet and constructing a protective wall around the village to protect it from being flooded in future, the RDO and CORE started construction of houses for the villagers.

“I think I will never be able to overcome the nightmare,” says Gulzar Ali, a mason who had also lost his house, when the entire village looked like a gigantic water pond, causing extensive damage to the houses. “Not only we lost our homes and animals, but our jobs as well and needed help desperately. Had the RDO and CORE not come to our rescue, we would have starved to death.”

Gulzar explains that since in most of the rural areas, people seldom have kitchens or washrooms constructed in their homes, village Dhodha has now become a model village in this area because of housing with these amenities.”

Shabir Kumar believes that the torrential rainfall of August 2022 seemed to be a curse of Mother Nature. “We had literally lost all hope, because our houses were damaged, people were homeless and jobless,” he says, feeling blessed with his new house.

“We are so poor that we cannot even afford to repair our boundary wall, let alone constructing a new house,” says Mai Zulekha, yet another beneficiary. “Last year, two children drowned in the standing water, but the wall constructed around the village will ensure safety of our children. I would never even dare to dream that someone would construct a house for us and we won’t have to spend a single paisa. Thank God, getting a new house is like a dream for us.”

Sonal and Mukhtiar Channa previously lived in the katcha area of Kamal Dero some 20 kilometers away from Kandiaro. Thirty years ago they moved to village Dhodha due to lawlessness in the katcha area. Both work as labourers and shared that their extreme poverty does not even allow them to lay a single brick on their own.

Among other beneficiaries of the new housing in village Dhodha includes Waziran, whose husband, a retired army personnel, passed away three years ago due to Covid-19. She is dependent on her late husband’s pension of Rs12000 and lives miserably. On the other hand, Sana Khatoon, a talented woman helps her husband by doing embroidery and making ralli to help support their family of five. She also works in the fields during the cotton-picking season for some more income.

There are also 12-14 Hindu families of the Marecho caste live in the village in a gated compound. Kishwar Kumar has five kids and works as a labourer for the local landlords. Some of these families own livestock such as buffaloes and goats, and they earn by selling their milk.

Perhaps the most deserving and helpless beneficiaries of the RDO and CORE housing are two sisters Hoor, 66, and Moomal, 70, who are mentally ill. When their house got damaged in August 2022, they shifted to their cousin’s house. Though both the women are not completely in their senses, they can however recall that they had a home which was demolished due to heavy rains last year. They also understand that their home has constructed by someone on a humanitarian basis.

“No doubt unprecedented rainfall and floods of 2022 was disastrous and the Sindh government made efforts to mitigate the sufferings of the people, the damage was too big for the government to manage alone and to reach out to each affected family,” said ex-MPA Syed Sarfaraz Hussain Shah on the occasion of handing over the possession of the houses. “No one can stop natural disasters from occurring, but we could only minimise its after-effects by providing relief to the affected people.”

According to Munawwar Gill, the founding Chairman of RDO, after distributing ration and other non-food items more or less 175,000 flood-affected people, a survey was done to provide shelters to the people of village Dhodha. “The poorest of the poor were identified, and work began to construct 30 houses in first phase for which finances were provided by the CORE,” shared Gill.

The contract for constructing shelters was awarded to a Lahore-based construction company ZOR, which started constructing single-roomed houses with basic amenities, a hand pump and a water storage tank, a novelty for this this village. The village streets and the foundation of all the houses were raised by three feet and a drainage system was also constructed. The beautiful models of the houses were made by the students of Riverside Community High School, located on left side of River Indus in Achiyon Kubyoon area

Gill shared that more houses will be constructed in village Hashim Chohan in the second phase and the process will continue through out the flood affected areas in Sindh, until every family has a house.