Earlier today, Pakistani villagers lay sandbags on a flood-stricken street at Sanawa village in Punjab province.
On The New York Times editorial page this morning, best-selling author — and mango farmer (!) — Daniyal Mueenuddin reflects on the flooding that continues to ravage his homeland, Pakistan:
"A few days ago, I stood atop a 30-foot-high levee in Pakistan’s south Punjab, looking out as the waters from the greatest Indus River flood in memory flowed past, through orchards, swirling around a village on higher ground half a mile out," he writes. "Twenty miles wide, the flood was almost dreamlike, the speeding water, as it streamed through the upper branches of trees, carrying along bits of brightly colored plastic and clumps of grass."
Tipping his hat to Tim O'Brien, he focuses on the things they — displaced families in Pakistan's south Punjab — carried:
...two or three cheap tin plates, a kettle. In one family's encampment, discordantly, sat a dresser with a mirrored door — how did the man who had brought that through the floodwater think it would be useful?
I found most pitiful a family gathered around a prostrate brown-and-white brindled cow. The father told me that the cow had been lost in the water for four days, and the previous night it had clambered up on another section of the levee, a mile away.
Mueenuddin isn't optimistic about what will happen to his neighbors and, indeed, many hundreds of thousands of his fellow Pakistanis:
"For months and even years, the people of the Indus Valley will not have sufficient income for food or clothing," he concludes. "They will rebuild, if they can afford it, by inches."
The corrupt and impoverished Pakistani government cannot possibly make these people’s lives whole again. It's not hard to imagine the potential for radicalization in a country already rapidly turning to extremist political views, to envision the anarchy that may be unleashed if wealthier nations do not find a way to provide sufficient relief. This is not a problem that will go away, and it is the entire world's problem. It is said, the most violent revolutions are the revolutions of the stomach.
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