Mothers cry for lost children

KHANDAR: Bibi Gul sits in a makeshift camp, feeding her seven-month-old son, as tears roll down her cheeks. When the monsoon downpours 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 stark 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.

“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.

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.

Mosquito bites pockmark the faces of her children. Her six-year-old son waddled up to her in the camp, holding out an empty water bottle. “I feel thirsty, but there is no water in the camp,” he said as Gul tried to lull his younger sister to sleep.

Children were crying in the camp and Gul wondered what the future could hold now that the family has 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, said that about 30 people had visited the camp since Monday, searching for missing children and family members.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 4^th, 2010.