Day 4 - Misery & help

Note: The following appeal is now closed.  You can support our ongoing work by donating to the Canadian Red Cross

 

After our sobering experience at the Sindh provincial Pakistan Red Crescent branch in Karachi, we continued our journey down to Sukkur and then onwards to Larkana.  This is where our own Canadian Red Cross mobile health clinic would soon be operational.

On the trip from the Sukkur airport to our accommodations in Larkana, we saw sites that reminded me of the dustbowl images from the Great Depression. Trucks piled high with household possessions and families perched on top were shuffling down the highway as hordes of people fled the rising flood waters. Carts belonging to poorer families were being pulled by donkeys, and men carried personal belongings on their backs.

After an overnight stay in Larkana, the local Red Crescent branch secretary took us into one part of his now-inundated territory. As we drove along, all we could see were tree tops and the occasional roof poking up from a vast lake that covered what had been rolling pastures and farm land only days earlier.

We were relieved to know that the people we saw living in tents along the road had received food and water from Red Crescent to keep them going, but an ongoing distribution was obviously going to be needed.  The monsoon rain season was not over and the waters would not recede for some time yet.

After several hours of driving, we arrived at the first of two Red Crescent tent camps we were to visit, and one urban camp set up in a school. Again, the relief operations we saw were well organized. People were being fed, and there was a medical dispensary to treat the many cases of skin rash and diarrhea caused by the dirty flood waters.

One signal I always look for in these situations, where large numbers of people have been displaced by disaster, is the attitude of the kids. If they are laughing and playing, well fed and with their parents – then this is evidence that the camp is being well run. These youngsters could not appreciate the consequences of their family’s losses that were very much on the minds of the adults.

We continued to the town of Khairpur, where we visited a Red Crescent hospital. Here, flood victims were being treated for a myriad of health problems caused by the floods. One of the most troubling sites was young children – in one case a two-hour old infant born in a nearby camp – lying in beds undergoing saline drips to treat extreme dehydration. Here were small numbers of people getting the medical attention they urgently needed, while countless others could not receive the same quality of care because of their rural isolation.

The PRCS staff we were travelling with took us back into the city of Sukkur, where we had flown in the day before, to visit another Red Crescent hospital. It crossed my mind that these two facilities, here in Sukkur and in Khairpur, could serve as triage centres for the Canadian/Norwegian mobile health clinic coming into this region.

Next we drove around the corner in crowded Sukkur to see a Red Crescent camp set up in a school compound. There were many such temporary settlements being created in school buildings throughout the country’s flood impact area. Plans were underway to establish more tent camps so the schools could be freed up for the next semester starting in September.

We stopped at one more Red Crescent tent camp on the way to the airport for our return flight through Karachi back to Islamabad.