The flood in Pakistan promises to soon make a dire situation intractably tragic. Aid money promised by international donors is trickling into the ground, and more often than not, isn’t reaching the neediest of the millions of victims of this two-week long catastrophe,
People are fighting and looting over food and the cramped conditions in which people have been stuffed, seems ready to explode with violence and the virulent contagion of water borne and airborne disease. Though the flood water is rising, there simply is not enough clean water to drink. And though Pakistan is now awash with humanitarian NGO’s, their leaders are experiencing difficulty getting in touch with their in-country personnel. It seem, then, that along with governments, supposedly mobile NGO’s are increasingly having to sit out this turn in and around grating human misery.
In the midst of this human cacophony, the World Bank has rerouted $900 million from other projects. Much of that money will go into assessing the damage already left asunder and to patch together a workable infrastructure to help deliver aid to the needy. Whatever the aid figures promised, they will be dwarfed by the final damage assessment, which can only be made after the flood waters recede. That is expected to happen in mid-September. Until then, one can only hope that the millions affected can get by with whatever portions of dignity they have left.
This is all devastating, and though tomorrow may offer an even more hopeless outcome for the people of the region, I ask you to take stock of the current goings on in the field.
I ask you to watch this excellent segment broadcast on yesterday’s PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer: