The 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. "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 UN 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 UN'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 UN officials in Islamabad.
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 UN 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 UN 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 UN's World Health Organization said
Tuesday.
