This summer, Pakistan witnessed an attack like never before as monsoon rains unleashed their full fury upon the country. The resulting floods, UN Secretary−General Ban Ki−Moon said, were the largest humanitarian disaster the UN has ever dealt with and have triggered the launching of the United Nations' largest appeal for humanitarian relief.
Indeed, the number of affected people surpasses the total figure for the number affected by the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and 2005 Kashmir earthquake combined. In my own home province of Sindh, 19 of the 23 districts in the province have been affected. In Swat, those struggling to rebuild their lives after the army drove out militants the year before watched helplessly as, for the second year in a row, their livelihoods and lands were destroyed.
While in Pakistan this summer, I was fortunate to join a group of friends on a trip to the flood−affected areas a few hours north of my home in Karachi. As we traveled up from the Arabian Sea coast, we snaked along the path of the mighty Indus River basin till we reached the edge of the Thar Desert that merges into the Indo−Pak border.
En route, we saw scenes of devastation that will never leave us — families on the sides of roads living with nothing; entire communities forced to flee and seek shelter on raised embankments; children drinking muddied water, unable to bear the heat and thirst any longer; and families piling all their belongings onto a truck and fleeing as fast as possible away from the mighty torrent that had descended upon their homelands.
The scenes we saw, in addition to moments even more heart wrenching and devastating that we did not witness, were unfortunately repeated all across Pakistan; one−fifth of the country's landmass and 20 million people — constituting an eighth of the populace — have been significantly impacted by the flooding. In addition to the devastation, we also saw hundreds of volunteers and social workers from all over Pakistan and across the world selflessly giving their time, energy and effort to help those in need — saving the world one child at a time throughout Pakistan.
While many across the world have been racing to help the affected people, others have been content to criticize and complain. Unfortunately, accusations of corruption and a lack of trust in Pakistan miss the point of disaster aid and only serve to worsen the lives of all those who are innocent and suffering.
I'll be among the first to admit that corruption exists in Pakistan, but in that, Pakistan is far from alone. Corruption is a problem in all developing, cash−strapped countries across the world and has involved victims of disasters like those that occurred in Haiti and Indonesia. To assume that not donating money will ensure that there is nothing for political elites to siphon off is naïve and will only serve to further the oppression of those already suffering under the thumb of corrupt governments. Indeed, tackling these perceptions as well as donor fatigue will be crucial not only for Pakistan, but for the entire international community, as the scale and frequency of major disasters seem to be increasing.
Helping us understand the scale and implications of this disaster and offering their experiences working on the ground are Pervez Hoodbhoy and Ali Cheema, both Pakistani academics who have been working in the field since the disaster struck and are eager to share their experiences. They will be joining the history department's Professor Ayesha Jalal at Tufts today at a panel discussion on the floods in Pakistan.
Hoodbhoy, a scholar in the Institute Scholars and Practitioners in Residence (INSPIRE) program at Tufts' Institute for Global Leadership and a Pakistani physicist, and Cheema, a visiting Fulbright scholar at Harvard University and an associate professor of economics and political science at Lahore University, will also be talking about lessons we can learn from this disaster, both for Pakistan in particular and disaster management in general.
The Tufts Association of South Asians' (TASA) event, "Beyond Devastation: Recovering from Pakistan's Floods" will be held today at 6:30 p.m. in Braker 001. The panel was spearheaded by TASA's political arm, the South Asian Political Action Committee. For more info, check out "Beyond Devastation" on Facebook.
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Faris Islam is a senior majoring in political science and history. He is a member of the Tufts Association of South Asians.
