Extreme flooding in Pakistan this summer caused more than 1,600 deaths and displaced approximately 33 million people from their homes. Sindh and Balochistan, in Pakistan’s southwest, remain the worst-hit provinces. From late August onward, as water from record rainfall and melting glaciers entered the flatlands of Sindh, it gushed onto fields where cotton is grown, flowed into pastures where cattle graze—and pooled into the houses of those who pick the crop and tend the livestock, rendering them homeless.
Some of those families now reside in relief camps on the few patches of dry land outside Dadu. This is the same district that UN High Commissioner for Refugees special envoy Angelina Jolie visited in late September. “In all my life, I have never seen anything like this,” Jolie said at the time. “Families are sleeping under open skies and have lost everything in these floods.”
In Dadu district, thousands of sun-bleached canvas tents are clustered in groups on either side of an elevated single-lane road. Families of five, six, eight, and even a dozen take shelter in a single tent. Every displaced person is battling hunger, heat exhaustion, dehydration, and gastrointestinal issues. Even then, some are more vulnerable than others—like pregnant women, nursing mothers, and tiny newborn babies. With little access to flooded district hospitals or even the traditional village dais (midwives) that they might usually turn to, expectant mothers are helpless.
This is the gap health care workers specializing in prenatal care are desperately trying to fill—the possibly fatal period between displacement and due date. Neha Mankani and Jahan Zuberi have traveled more than 300 kilometers from Karachi in order to examine displaced pregnant women in the relief camps in Dadu and deliver hundreds of what they call safe-delivery kits.
A mother accepts baby food for her childHamna Zubair
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