NUR REHMAN’S exact age is anyone’s guess but everyone in his village knows that he is old enough to remember the great floods of 1929.
In the decades since, Nur, a wiry man with rheumy eyes and a long straggly beard, has witnessed much upheaval – from the convulsions that accompanied the birth of Pakistan following partition in 1947 to army coups and the rise of militancy in his restive home province.
But in terms of natural disasters, until late last month nothing had compared with the rains that pummelled this corner of what is now northwest Pakistan just over 80 years ago. Nur was little more than a boy at the time, but one image remains lodged in his memory – the sight of a child being swept away by the swirling flood waters.
Many in Pakistan have drawn on the 1929 floods as a yardstick against which to measure the magnitude of the deluge that has struck vast swathes of the country in recent weeks. The lives of up to 20 million people have been turned upside down in what, according to conventional wisdom, has been the most devastating flooding since that fateful year. In fact, says Nur, it is far worse.
“The river was not so full or high in 1929,” he recalls. “You cannot compare the damage the floods have done over the last two weeks or the trauma it has caused.” Sitting on a charpoy, the traditional low-slung bed made of wood and rope found in rural Pakistan, Nur and his fellow villagers talk of what the waters have left behind. Collapsed homes and destroyed crops.
Livelihoods wiped out in a matter of hours. One child drowned and many more are sick with diarrhoea, scabies and eye infections. Fear that life will get worse before it gets better. Nur, who uses a roughly hewn walking cane, is sharing a tent with 10 members of his family after their home was almost completely destroyed. His village, located down winding country roads, is full of such stories as its inhabitants struggle to pick up the pieces of their lives.
Aid has started to trickle in but the villagers are carefully rationing their own food stocks for the hard months to come. It will be at least a year before the surrounding fields bring forth a harvest. Whatever crops were not washed away now lie smothered in the thick sludge the floodwaters left behind. For this village of small farmers, it is yet another reminder of all that has been lost.
3.5 million children at risk of deadly diseases as filthy water stagnates: World, page 9