Desperate flood refugee gives birth in vast Muslim graveyard in southern Pakistan

Flood refugee gives birth in graveyard in Pakistan

MAKLI, Pakistan — Jannah Soorjo was forced to give birth in a sprawling Muslim graveyard in southern Pakistan filled with hundreds of thousands of flood victims, a reminder of the pain and despair gripping the country even as the floodwaters begin to flow out to sea.

The feverish 26-year-old mother is one of 500,000 women affected by the floods whom the United Nations expects will give birth in the next six months. Many of their children will enter a world where food and water are scarce and the risk of deadly disease is high.

“I gave birth to this baby, but how can I arrange food for him here,” Soorjo said, cradling her newborn son Tuesday. “He seems to be sick, and we don’t have money for his treatment.”

Soorjo fled to the cemetery on top of a hill in Makli four days ago to escape the floodwaters, which inundated dozens of villages and towns in her southern Sindh province.

The floods began over a month ago in the northwest after extremely heavy monsoon rains and surged south along the Indus River.

The floodwaters finally started emptying into the Arabian Sea on Tuesday, hours after swallowing the two final towns in its path, both of which had been evacuated, said disaster management official Hadi Bakhsh.

But the challenges of delivering emergency aid to 8 million people remained.

“The situation is extremely critical,” said Josette Sheeran, the head of the World Food Program, after touring flood-stricken areas with other top U.N. officials.

Her agency has managed to deliver food to 3 million people, but another 3 million require food aid, and that number could grow as authorities assess the damage the floods have done in the south, said Sheeran.

While the U.N.’s children’s agency has delivered fresh water to 2 million people, it still needs to reach 6 million more, and aid workers have only managed to vaccinate 10 to 15 percent of the children in need, said UNICEF director Anthony Lake.

He warned that without quick action the country was headed toward a second wave of tragedy marked by outbreaks of cholera and waterborne disease.

“This is likely to get much worse,” said Lake during a joint news conference with other U.N. officials in Islamabad.

The scale of the disaster has raised concerns about the stability of nuclear-armed Pakistan, which is already reeling from al-Qaida and Taliban violence and massive economic woes.

Foreign countries have pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to help Pakistan respond to the floods. Even the country’s archenemy, India, has offered assistance and announced Tuesday that it was increasing its aid from $5 million to $25 million.

Donors have given about two-thirds of the $460 million the U.N. requested for emergency aid, said Sheeran, the head of the World Food Program. But the food agency itself has less than half the money it needs to feed those affected. The agency also needs 40 heavy helicopters to airlift food to the 800,000 people cut off from the heavily damaged road network, she said.

Foreign donors and the U.N. were slow to respond to the disaster, in part because it took a long time for its extent to become clear. Aid is slowly reaching the worst-affected areas by army helicopter, road and boat, but millions have received little or no help.

Authorities have also struggled to cope with a growing number of cases of severe diarrhea and malaria caused by dirty water that offers a perfect breeding ground for insects and disease. More than 500,000 cases of acute diarrhea and nearly 95,000 cases of suspected malaria have been treated since the floods first hit, the U.N.’s World Health Organization said Tuesday.

Once all the floodwaters recede, the country will be left with a massive relief and reconstruction effort that will cost billions of dollars and take years. An estimated 1 million homes have been damaged or destroyed, five times as many as were hit by this year’s earthquake in Haiti.

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Associated Press Writer Ashraf Khan in Karachi and Ravi Nessman in Islamabad contributed to this report.