Belqis, 20 years old:“I don't know where I can give birth to my son and I don't know how it will be.” © Thomas Schwartz/CARE

By Thomas Schwarz
Aug. 16, 2010

It is unbearably hot. Forty degrees or even some more. Humidity does the rest. In the southern part of Punjab in Pakistan thousands and thousands are fleeing the flooding, to all points of the compass. The water has forced them to leave their homes, their villages, their cities.

Maybe one hundred out of those thousands were brought to a small forest, just near a busy and noisy road, maybe two hours’ car drive from Multan. Who brought them here – no one knows. They told them that this place was better for them. Then, one day later, they delivered some food and water. They received a card with a triangle kind of logo on it, a name under it and a stamp. After that they were never seen again, here in Mahmood Kot, in the South of Punjab in Pakistan.

Up to 20 million people have been affected by one the worst natural disasters the world has ever seen. Six million out of them are in need of immediate help. Now, without any delay. Almost one out of every 10 Pakistanis has had to flee his village and has lost his home or job or belongings. Hundreds, thousands of acres of farming land are under water. Up to 1,600 Pakistanis lost their lives. Their number will probably increase, and thousands of flood victims are not even reached.

A face is hidden behind all those anonymous numbers, who nobody is able to understand. It is the face of Belqis. With her this catastrophe gets a real face. She is twenty years old and lives in this noisy part of the forest along the road between Multan and Muzaffargarh. The place, where she is forced to live now, is called Jamal Wala. It's only twelve kilometers away from her village, which is completely flooded. But she cannot return there, not now. The water will not go. And she hears that even more water is coming from the north.

Belqis is eight months pregnant. She sits on a kind of camp bed, but there are only several ropes strung between wood on which she can lay down her body to relax from time to time.  A camp bed like this is very common here, but for a pregnant woman, given these circumstances, it is hard to endure. Next to her rests her young husband, on another camp bed of the same kind. He cannot help her: “He has fever, he would love to support me, but he is too weak,” Belqis says. Someone fans some air in his direction, with a strong piece of fabric. Between all the camp bed the animals of the villagers are running around. Goats, cows, some cats too. It's not a range, but the animals don't care. Excrement is everywhere between the women, children and men.

“It will be a boy,” Beqis smiles. The sweat pearls between her upper lip and her nose are becoming more. “If it were a girl, that would please us as well. It is good, as Allah wants it.”

But life here, she says, is tough. She says it is friendly, but sad. “I don't know where I can give birth to my son and I don't know how it will be.” It will be her first baby. Despite her own thoughts and fears she is worried about another woman, who has to live in the woods as well. “She is pregnant like me, but already in her ninth month. Will someone support her?”

CARE is working in Punjab with a local aid agency, AWAS. They have listened and immediately decided to do something, together with CARE. In this little, noisy section of forest all pregnant women will be registered and supported. They will be brought to a hospital and looked after. Even a big international organization like CARE is limited in the face of such a huge disaster. But it is able, with their partners in the field, to save lives like Belqis' and help to make it a dignified one. And give them a new perspective.