In Flooded Pakistan Village, Oxfam Partner Helps Families Cope
9 August 2007
A local aid group, Thardeep Rural Development Program, focuses on families who have lost their homes and their assets, while one little girl is assigned a big responsibility: to retrieve relief goods for her needy family.
Shazia Khozo is just 10, but on a recent day in her flooded village of Fatehali Khoso in Pakistan, it fell to her to carry out an important mission. She was the one her parents sent to collect food rations for her entire family from a local organization called Thardeep Rural Development Program.
Since floods swept across two of Pakistan’s provinces in July, Thardeep, an Oxfam partner, has helped more than 5,000 households in the Dadu district of Sindh where Shazia’s family lives. A shelter made of sticks and straw has been her family’s home since water inundated their house.
When Thardeep’s assessment team visited Shazia’s village, it identified the most vulnerable families. The aid group focuses on those who have lost their homes and most of their assets. And it gives extra priority to households headed by women and to families who are surviving in makeshift shelters along the roadside. Shazia’s family is one of the ones Thardeep knew needed help. The agency offered her family a voucher and invited them to visit a distribution point. Shazia made the trip with her uncle, who also received a voucher for his family.
On distribution day, Shazia signed for the goods with a finger print, like most of the people who came that day to pick up food and water containers. Only one fifth of the people in her village can read and write, and most of them are men. Shazia, who has three younger siblings, does not have the opportunity to go to school. Instead, she spends her days helping her mother with household chores.
Flour, rice, lentils, cooking oil, sugar, tea, spices, potatoes, and onions were among the goods Shazia collected that day—a 77-pound bundle of food that is enough to feed a family of seven for one week. Vegetables, meat, and milk are still available in local shops, but in areas hit hardest by the floods, the supply is scarce. And shopkeepers have stopped selling goods on credit for fear that families will not be able to pay them back on time. Many of the local families worked in rice fields now ruined by the floods. It will be two years before the fields can produce a harvest again.
Food isn’t the only thing Shazia’s family needs. The ground water in the area where they live is brackish, and there is a shortage of safe drinking water. So Shazia also received a five-gallon water cooler that her family can refill from a mobile water tank that Thardeep sends into the villages on a daily basis. The cooler has a lid to keep the insects out and a tap to make sure that the water is distributed in a hygienic fashion.
Loading their goods onto a donkey cart, Shazia and her uncle made their way back home. They had to drive carefully because of flooding on the roads. If the roads get too bad, Thardeep will resort to boats to make sure it can continue to provide relief items and medical care to other villages.
