Pakistan flood

Eid brings little joy to flood victims,

HYDERABAD: Our life is worse than death. Eid is for the living, but we are neither alive nor dead, says a solemn 15-year-old Rukhsana, approaching this year’s Eid with sad defeat. “We have no clothes, no food, no shoes and no home. My brother is very young, he can’t fight the looters who snatch all the food from the aid trucks,” she says.

Abandoned by her father after her mother died, the teenage refugee will spend today’s Eid holiday with her grandmother and 10-year-old brother in a makeshift camp. While most of the Muslim world celebrated Eid on Friday, the festival falls on Saturday in Pakistan.

Bringing an end to Ramazan, it should be an occasion for family celebration and gift giving, but for Pakistan’s poor and hungry flood survivors, this year’s holiday offers more rain and little joy.

In Hyderabad, a city now teeming with more than one million people displaced by the floodwaters, Rukhsana mills gloomily around a camp lined with donated tarpaulin tents filling the grounds of a vegetable market.

“When we were at home, our grandmother would arrange something for us on Eid, but now we don’t even have a home,” she says woefully.

Eid is a time of lavish celebration for those who can afford it. Women don new dresses and cook special feasts for big family gatherings, while children are given eidi to buy sweets and toys. But in Sindh, weather forecasters predict more rain will come today, threatening to turn thousands of unhygienic relief camps into muddy bogs. 

Already, humid conditions in Pakistan’s southern belt have scorched the skin of those managing a living without proper shelter.

Flood survivors say this year’s festival offers no respite from their grim reality, and recall instead golden memories of Eid celebrations back home. “We had our own houses, buffalos and crops. We would celebrate at home with joy and enthusiasm,” says 45-year-old farmer Haji Hussain.

“But now we have no money, no food and no clothes to celebrate and have fun,” says the father of eight, who migrated from Ghauspur. The buffalos he brought with the family were stolen, he says.

“Now I am penniless. My children are sad and desperate because I have nothing to buy them. We can’t be happy this Eid,” he says.

Mother-of-four Karima Bibi, 30, says she is also powerless to provide her children with a break from the misery of the floods.

“Eid is for those who have money and shelter and who have something to give to their children. We have nothing. We don’t even have shelter to save our children from the scorching heat,” she says.

“This year we will wear the same old clothes and will just give our children any food we are given,” she says. afp