DADU, Pakistan — The view from Muhammad Jafar’s small mud-brick house in southern Pakistan brought him a sense of relief. A rolling field of green cotton shrubs was right at his door, and its white flowers promised enough income to get his family through the year.
Today, his fields, along with other vast swaths of Pakistan, lie under green, rotten water. About two weeks ago, his land was completely submerged, including a well for drinking water, in one of the latest rounds of record-breaking flooding that has plagued the country since June.
“We live on an island now,” Jafar, 40, told a visiting New York Times journalist on Tuesday.
Devastating floods have inundated hundreds of villages across much of Pakistan’s fertile land. In the southern province of Sindh, flooding has effectively turned what was once farmland into two large lakes, engulfing entire villages and turning others into fragile islands. Pakistani officials said the floods were the worst in recent history. They warn that it could take him three to six months for the floodwaters to recede.
About 1,500 people have died so far, nearly half of them children, and more than 33 million people have been forced from their homes by floods caused by heavier-than-usual monsoon rains and melting glaciers.
In Dadu district, one of the worst-hit areas in southern Pakistan’s Sindh province, floods have completely submerged about 300 villages and left many others behind. Across the state, about 40,000 square miles of land, roughly the size of Virginia, is currently under water, officials said.
Where farmers once plowed fields of cotton and wheat, now wooden motorboats traverse rotting ponds, ferrying people between flood-stricken towns and stranded villages. Scattered along the water’s edge are schoolchildren’s sandals, medicine bottles, and bright blue books spilling out of the flooded school windows.
Swarms of mosquitoes dance around the tops of trees sticking out of the water. Power lines hang precariously near its surface.
Tens of thousands of people whose homes were destroyed fled to neighboring towns and cities, finding refuge in schools, public buildings, roadsides and along canal embankments. They take refuge in cobblestone tents with spare tarps and rope beds that they have salvaged before the floods arrived.
Many of the lucky few whose villages were not completely submerged stayed in their homes and were effectively left behind. Pakistani authorities are urging people to leave isolated villages and if thousands remain, they will overwhelm already strained aid efforts, causing widespread food insecurity and posing a health crisis as the disease spreads. I warn you that it is possible.
But residents have reasons to stay, they say. You need to protect your precious valuables – surviving livestock, refrigerators, tin roofs – from thieves. The cost of renting a boat and moving family and belongings is too high. The prospect of living in a tent camp is too bleak.
Yet their living conditions are miserable. Malaria, dengue fever and water-borne diseases are widespread. The area has been hit by monsoon rains and heat waves since it submerged. The government cut off power to the area as a safety measure to prevent people from being electrocuted, plunging the village into darkness every night. .
“We are abandoned. We have to survive on our own,” said Ali Nawaz, 59, a cotton farmer from Wad Kosa village in Dadu.
The village of Wado Khosa is home to about 150 people who cultivate cotton fields for large landowners. The cotton fields were almost ready for harvest one night about two weeks ago, residents said, when floodwaters swept through the fields.
Coming out of the house at dawn they were in awe. The village was completely surrounded by water that stretched to the horizon.
“My mind wasn’t working. 29-year-old Nadia called said.
Locals say the water has receded about a foot since that day. But life on an island turned village is barely survivable. Both village wells were destroyed by flooding, so they have to drink salt water from a hand pump that they previously used only to wash their clothes and dishes. Almost everyone in the village has malaria or typhoid fever, Nadia said.
Even just procuring food is a big deal. Vegetable prices have tripled since the flood began, and Nadia’s family can’t afford to hire a boat to pick them up in a remote village and take them to the market. So every few days her cousin, her 18-year-old Faiz, her ants, swim along what used to be a road for about 20 minutes through rotting water, reach a dike, and survive the flood. I walked to the Johi town market.
After buying small portions of potatoes, rice and vegetables, he straps a small bag of food to his back, jumps into the water and swims home. He raises his head above the stinking lake to try not to swallow the water and to keep an eye out for crawling snakes.
“It’s hard. It’s scary — it still scares me every time I go,” he said.
After describing the depth of the water, he stood up and raised his hand about two feet above his head.
Their families are grateful that Johi survived the worst of the floods. However, they and their neighbors say they felt neglected by the government and aid efforts and eventually saved themselves. Hurrying to reinforce the embankment, I packed my bags with stones, sand, grass, and whatever else I could find.
Since then, the town has become an important transit point for residents of the nearby villages.The 30-minute boat trip to Dadu City stops along the main drag, where the water is slightly shallower.
Their hull is filled with herds of people, motorcycles, cows and goats that farmers ensured Dadu’s safety when the floods began and are now returning home. At one storefront, a storekeeper lined up large solar panels in the sun and offered to charge people’s cell phones for a nominal fee.
A 15-year-old young woman, Amira, and her mother-in-law, Bali, left the boat in Dadu City. Amira was holding her newborn baby. A few days ago, she gave birth around midnight in a makeshift camp where she and her family lived near Johi after the village was completely submerged in a flood.
They manage to find a rickshaw and take it to Johi, and track the boat to take her to a big city hospital, where she gives birth by caesarean section. Now Amira wade through her ankle-deep water, wade through slippery mud, and stepped onto a parcel of dry land. She and her family tried to make their way to a temporary home in the mountains.
Most residents say they have received little, if any, assistance from international relief agencies or governments. Occasionally, boats laden with rice and tea from local non-profits arrive at isolated villages. But most days they simply stand guard and wait, hoping that help will come.
In another beleaguered village nearby, 25-year-old Mounir Ahmad sat on a rope bed in the living room of a small house. The floor was covered in a thick layer of sticky mud from the water splashing from the door. His surviving livestock — six goats, a cow, and several chickens — stood on one side of the room while his 10-year-old sister Bhaktawar was cooking roti his bread over an open fire.
A few days ago, when his five-year-old son fell ill with a high fever, Ahmad called a passing boat to take him and his wife to a hospital in the big city. Now his mother and his two sisters are sick, they say, either from the nightly mosquito swarms or from the drinking water they get from a nearby pump.
“Even goats are sick,” he said.
Still, he and his family want to live in the house as long as it’s built.
“I don’t want to live in a tent,” he said. “Home is home.”