On the road in from the airport, the water shimmered under the moonlight as men, women and children sat in the dark, near the would-be lake shore. During the day, river dolphins can usually be spotted in the nearby river.
Idyllic, you might think. But this dusty and ramshackle town is at the front line of one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters in living memory, sitting on the Indus River in Pakistan’s southern Sindh province.
Usually there is no water lapping up at the roadside, and the only people there would be those out for an evening snack after the daytime Ramadan fast. But since torrential monsoon rain swelled the Indus River and of Pakistan has been left flooded and 4 million Pakistanis are now homeless, and another 600,000 are threatened down-river, meaning they might have to flee as well.
In the city, I spoke to Ashraf, who said he had left his family outside the city where he had come to buy some food. “We managed to gather up some of our possessions before the waters came, but we did not have much warning. Our home is under water completely. I have enough money on me to feed my children for another couple of days, that is all.”
Pakistan is once more reeling from nature’s cruel hand, less than five years after an earthquake killed 80,000 people mainly in the country’s north. This time — though the death toll is much lower — the impact is vast — running the entire 3180km length of the Indus River from the mountainous north of Pakistan to the flood-prone plains here in the south.
More than 6.8 million hectares of land is under water and, out of the mind-boggling 20 million people affected by the floods — about 800,000 people remain beyond the reach of aid workers or the Pakistani army, cut off by rising waters that in turn wrecked bridges and submerged roads. Cases of diarrhea, cholera, skin diseases, as well as malaria and dengue — with mosquitoes proliferating amid the floodwaters — are growing.
Almost 5 million people now have no access to clean water. The disaster is as vast as the swollen country-long lake that the Indus River has become.
Sukkur is derived from the Arabic word for intense, according to some historical accounts that date the name to Umayyad conquerors coming to the region more than a millennium ago. For aid workers with the NGO GOAL now stationed in the town, the epithet seems apt.
Emergency co-ordinator Brian Casey was at the forefront of relief work in Haiti after the earthquake and in Burma after Cyclone Nargis. He said: “People are hungry, people are getting sick, and we don’t know yet how much worse things will get as the water rises in places. And at the same time we have to think about how to help people rebuild homes and farms once the waters recede.”
So…how unsympathetic!! “dolphins play as floods bring intense suffering” but then in the text nothing covers this other than “During the day, river dolphins can usually be spotted in the nearby river”….so in the ever lowering grade of Crikey reporting this one is one for media watch!
The “River-dophins” are not playing, they are merely “spotted” “usually” whatever that means “during the day” so no spotlights are needed….. and they are spotted not down at the pub or at a footie match eating a pie or even watching the movies…no!..they are spotted in the River. How very curious.
We then find that “nature” has “intent” through “Pakistan is once more reeling from nature’s cruel hand”
I appreciate the writer may be a person new to the writing of relevancy in issues as this one wanders about trying to pick up some moss or gloss.
Please get some quality into Crikey writings. It’s plumbing the depths.
I agree with you entirely, blowtorch – this travelogue style news-as-infotainment piece is totally unsuited to this particular medium but I am sure the author has pure intentions in seeking to raise the profile of this horrific natural disaster
Someone should point out the utter absurdity of western governments spending hundreds of billions of dollars fighting Islamic extremism in Afghanistan and Northern Pakistan yet allowing extremist Islamic charities to fill the void in delivering aid to most victims of this cataclysm – the western response thus far has been generally fairly lack lustre to say the least.
Dollar for dollar, emergency aid is a far cheaper and far more effective way of winning hearts and minds than waging war against them
I donated to Plan International, who already had teams are on the ground in the Southern Punjab and Sindh regions when this began, but there are numerous other charities that deserve our help.
Please dig deep and donate if you can
I donated to the Australian Red Cross Pakistan floods appeal. I urge others to donate to a charity that can help. I agree with your second paragraph, Acidic Muse.
Acidic Muse. Actually, I agree with your whole post.
As a copy editor, I must say that some of the criticism of the journalist is unfounded, and perhaps a little patronising. Reporters do not write headlines, editors and subs do. That should be common knowledge to the media-savvy critics above…With that in mind, the criticisms about the dolphin angle only holds water, no pun intended, if the reporter was also responsible for the headline, which is not the case I am sure.
There is a full version of the article here – http://www.simonroughneen.com – which shows the reporter to have traveled widely to many disasters.
I think also the point of the paragraph was to show the difference between the river at normal times and now – after the disaster. Whether the ‘travelogue’ style, as it is called above, is appropriate, is a matter of taste and comes down to one’s own subjective viewpoint. Personally I do not think it is ‘travelogue’ or ‘infotainment’ at all, and have no problem with it even if is is, but sets the broader issue in context rather nicely, reminding that there very recently was more to this place than the disaster.
‘nature’s cruel hand’ – an old expression, hardly signifying that the author thinks nature has ‘intent’, any more than Shakespeare thought time was a living creature in any of sonnets that portrayed time as having such autonomous, living qualities. Personification is a literary device – overused I feel – but one taught to schoolkids and therefore should be nothing new to any reader here..
On another matter, don’t take this the wrong way, but criticism of the writer would work better if the critics above – particularly the first one – expressed their view with coherent sentences. This would work better than the inchoate rambles with no apparent concept of grammar, much less syntax seen above. For example – “I appreciate the writer may be a person new to the writing of relevancy in issues as this one wanders about trying to pick up some moss or gloss” – what sort of babble is that?!