IOM trucks driving through heavy rain on flood-damaged roads delivered the first of the tents to destitute families in Gubella village in Charsadda district within 12 hours of their arrival in Pakistan.
Half the tents were trucked to Charsadda, the other half to equally hard-hit Nowshera district, together with 500 buckets and kitchen sets donated by IOM.
IOM expects to take delivery of and distribute another 1,000 tents and 4,100 shelter kits donated by DFID today. Later this week IOM will take delivery of a further 24,000 buckets and 48,600 blankets donated by DFID.
Today IOM’s Islamabad logistics cell will also receive a consignment of 14,000 blankets and 1,153 (24 x 100 ft) rolls of plastic sheet from USAID’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA). Plastic sheet has been identified by shelter experts as the most urgently needed shelter item requested from foreign donors.
All the items will be distributed to flood victims by IOM and its partners. IOM teams work with village elders before any aid distribution to identify the families most in need. They then provide the families with tokens that can be exchanged for tents and other relief items when the distribution takes place.
“The community knows who is most vulnerable and who most needs the aid. The token system also ensures crowd control and minimizes the risk of looting by people who are desperate,” says IOM Pakistan Emergency Officer Izora Mutya Maskun.
In Gubella, where a local leader offered his “hujra” or walled compound for the distribution, villagers stood patiently in the rain waiting to exchange their tokens for tents. Men carried the heavy tents on their shoulders, while women and children carried the buckets and kitchen sets through the mud to camp sites on higher ground.
Charsadda, which lies at a confluence of five rivers flowing into the Indus valley from the mountains of Kashmir and Afghanistan, has already sustained terrible damage from the floods, but with no sign of the rain abating, is bracing itself for further destruction of property and livelihoods.
Jan Akbar Khan, whose home in the town of Charsadda survived, but was flooded with over two metres of water on July 29th, says that people feel helpless in the face of the floods, which he says are unprecedented in the district in his lifetime. “It is not like an earthquake. You can see it coming, but there is nothing that you can do about it,” he observes.
As the rivers have burst their banks, vast expanses of water have engulfed Charsadda’s villages and lush farmland. Villagers whose houses were constructed of mud bricks and thatch saw their homes dissolve. Hundreds of acres of peach and pear orchards and sugar cane fields now lie under a metre of water.
With each rainfall, new torrents of brown water pour in, destroying roads, bridges and buildings. Sections of the six-lane highway linking the capital Islamabad with Peshawar, capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) province, completed in 2007, are crumbling as the flood waters erode its foundations and bridges.
At the points where it crosses the vast expanses of the Indus and Kabul rivers, it seems to float on a sea of rising mist and rain. Displaced villagers camp on the central reservation, tethering their animals to the crash barriers, while their children play on the road.
Pakistan’s worst floods on record are now affecting an estimated 13.8 million people as the flood waters flow south from KPK to the country’s heartland Punjab and Sindh provinces.
The Emergency Shelter Cluster of aid agencies working with the government to deliver emergency shelter and other non-food relief items to the displaced say that they expect the number of displaced families to rise from an estimated 250,000 to 300,000.
The cost of providing them with tents, shelter kits using plastic or tin sheet, and other non-food relief items such as buckets, jerry cans, kitchen sets and blankets could reach USD 105 million, according to the group, which comprises 41 local and international agencies, including the UN and the Red Cross / Red Crescent, and is coordinated by IOM.
For more information on IOM’s activities in Pakistan and flood relief pictures, please go to: http://www.iom.int/jahia/Jahia/pakistan. For more information on the work of the Emergency Shelter Cluster please go to: https://sites.google.com/site/shelterpak2010/.
For additional information please contact IOM Islamabad. Chris Lom, Tel. +92.3085204684. Email: clom@iom.int. Or Saleem Rehmat, Tel. +92.3008560341. Email: srehmat@iom.int
