The Daily - Pakistan, Under Water

Episode Date: October 5, 2022

A few weeks into this year’s monsoon season in Pakistan, it became clear that the rains were unlike anything the country had experienced in a long time.The resulting once-in-a-generation flood has marooned entire villages and killed 1,500 people, leaving a trail of destruction, starvation and disease.Guest: Christina Goldbaum, an Afghanistan and Pakistan correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: The flooding has crippled Pakistan’s agricultural sector, threatening a food crisis and dealing another critical blow to a country already in the economic doldrums.Farm laborers are scrambling to salvage whatever they can from the battered remains of their cotton and rice harvests. It is desperate work.More than 33 million people have been displaced, with vast areas of Pakistan likely to take months to dry out.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, in Pakistan, a once-in-a-generation flood has submerged a third of the country, marooned entire villages, and killed a staggering 1,500 people. entire villages, and killed a staggering 1,500 people. My colleague Christina Goldbaum was there and documented what happens when the floodwaters refuse to recede. It's Wednesday, October 5th. Christina, we are talking to you from Karachi, one of the largest cities in Pakistan.

And you have been reporting from Pakistan for weeks now on the floods there. And at this point, we are very deep into the aftermath of this natural disaster. But I want to start at the beginning with the flooding itself. So can you roll back the clock a little bit and take us to the start? So at the beginning of June, the usual monsoon season started in Pakistan. And this is the three or four month long period where the country gets very heavy rains. You know, the season is always tough. There's always some damage, some electricity lines go down, some homes get destroyed. And, you know, back in 2010, there were really intense rains that caused a lot of destruction and loss of life. But within a few weeks this year of the monsoon season,

it became very clear that the rains and the floods that we were seeing were unlike anything the country had experienced in a very long time. The rains just didn't stop, and they were a lot heavier than usual. You know, week after week, they were breaking records. And causing these massive floods. You know, we were seeing videos of homes being washed away, of floodwater crashing through bridges.

There was this five-star luxury hotel that got swept away in seconds from floodwater. Wow. Just gone. Just gone. Just gone. And by early September, Pakistani officials were saying that a third of the country was underwater.

Wow. So that's an area around the same size as all of Britain. And it was suddenly submerged. Nearly a thousand have been killed so far, hundreds of them children. 33 million are affected. That's one in every seven Pakistanis. Prompting a government minister to call it a

humanitarian disaster of epic proportions. Pakistan's prime minister has repeatedly visited hard-hit areas this flooding season, insisting his administration is doing all it can. And so in early September, when I got a visa to finally go to Pakistan, I hopped on a plane there. And I spent the last couple of weeks traveling around Sindh province in the south, one of the worst hit areas of the country. And it was like nothing I had ever seen before. And what did you see? So I arrived in Karachi, this big port city in the south, and our plan was to first go to a place called Dadu. It was one of the worst hit areas by the

flood. And so we got into our big four-wheel drive car, and it's nighttime, and we start driving up to the district along this highway. And we're on this highway, and we keep passing these trucks that have little speedboats in the back of them. And, you know, it's a full moon outside, and at one point I look out the window, and I can kind of see this like black shimmering water. And I asked my colleague Zia, who's a reporter based in Karachi, who was with us, are we passing a lake? What is this? And he said, no, no, that's the flood water. And keep in mind, we were still four or five hours from the worsted areas. And the next morning we arrived in Dadu so it's around 9 30 we just got to Dadu district it's one of the worst hit in Sindh and we went to what used to be a bus station where people

were going between the city and their farmland or villages. And the bus station had basically turned into a dock. And everything around us is just water. It looks like we're at the beginning of a huge lake. There's a ton of people around. A lot of these kind of wooden canoes that people are taking out to get to their land if it's still above water but stranded. So boats are now public transportation at a bus station. Exactly.

Some people are coming in from their homes, and it looks like they're carrying suitcases, other bags with their stuff. And people were there, these big crowds, and they were moving, you know, huge bags of wheat and of rice to their villages. Some people were moving their entire herds of goats or of cows. There are a bunch of guys with a, there's a big brown cow in one of these boats, and they're trying to push him off the boat to get him onto some dry land. So we took a boat out to see some of that area. And truly, what was farmland was now just this giant lake.

And popping out of the water, we saw the second story of schools that were submerged. This is a school. Oh, wow. We saw villages that had basically become islands because they were completely surrounded. Homes had either partially collapsed or were completely underwater. We saw these blue notebooks from a school that were just floating by the window,

you know, a random flip-flop here and there. So this area has been physically redrawn by water for what will probably be a very long time. That's right. for what will probably be a very long time. That's right. There are entire communities that will either be living on islands or displaced for months or even years to come. But while I was in Dadu, I heard about another district, a farming area called Nawabshah, which is a couple of hours away.

And there, the water had begun to recede just a bit. All right, so it's around 10 a.m. We just arrived in Nawabsha district. It's a big cotton and wheat growing area. We're going to try to talk to some farmers here. And as we're going along this long bumpy road, you could see the kind of shriveled stalks of cotton popping up from the water. It looks like the harvest is about half submerged in water. And we're walking down this little path to where these small mud brick homes are to talk to some of the farmers there. And we meet this one guy, Miraj.

And he starts telling us about when the rains came to their village a couple of weeks earlier. He didn't remember the date, but he said suddenly in the night, the rain started. So suddenly in the night, it started to rain. Was it very heavy rain? It was very heavy. Have you ever seen such heavy rain? No, I haven't. He said, I didn't see such life in my life. I've never seen such heavy rain. Okay, so heavy his home and it was in the middle of the night and he could hear this really heavy rain just pounding down. He's saying that where we're sitting right now, the water, when it was really heavily raining

for that 56 hours, it was up to his waist. Okay. Okay. And so at first they came out here into the yard because they were afraid of the house collapsing. And as they were, they stayed there for all 56 hours, despite the raining, just they were exposed in the rain. And as they were, they stayed there for all 56 hours. Despite the rain. Despite the raining, just they were exposed in the rain. And every time

that one of the walls of one of their houses collapsed, they could hear like, it felt like an explosion that they could hear. And they leave everything. And for Miraj,

and he watched for hours as the water just started rising and rising. He said that we lost everything. as the water just started rising and rising. You know, he was going to his fields every few hours. He's saying that when he went there in front of his eyes, he saw his crops being destroyed. And watching as the water level just rose until it completely covered what would have been his entire fall harvest. Well, explain that.

How does farming work in this region? So in this part of Pakistan, farmers usually farm two crops. Every fall, they harvest cotton or Pakistan, farmers usually farm two crops. Every fall, they harvest cotton or rice, and they sell that harvest. And that's their big payday for the year. And then around late October or November, they start planting wheat. And that's their main source of food. And so as Miraj was watching the water rise up and cover his cotton harvest, As Miraj was watching the water rise up and cover his cotton harvest, basically what he was seeing was one of those paydays suddenly gone. That harvest was ruined.

And he was beginning to worry that in a couple of weeks, in late October, when he was meant to plant the wheat, the water would still be there. And that wouldn't just be one harvest that's gone, but his harvest next year of wheat too. What is he feeling? Is he worried? So we are worried because if there is no wheat harvest, what will we eat? So he is now at risk of losing both his cotton, which is basically his currency, his money, and his wheat, which is his food, his diet. Exactly.

And as I'm sitting there talking to him, there is this other woman nearby, Padma, who's around 50 years old. And she came over and tapped me on the shoulder because she wanted to tell me about her harvest, too, that had been underwater with the floods. And so I asked to go see her fields to see what they looked like now a couple of weeks after the worst of the rains came. So we're driving down the road in Noab Shah, and on either side of the road,

there's just these fields of what was cotton and water. That probably goes up to people's waists, people's ankles. The tops of the cotton trees are kind of coming out of the water. They look really brown, kind of dead. And among those tops of trees, there's the little white blossoms of the actual cotton. trees there's like the little white blossoms of the actual cotton and as we've been driving we've been seeing people who are wading way steep into the water trying to salvage the bits of cotton that we can. So Padma's leading us into her field. You can see there's still like probably a foot of water in parts of it. The other is really slippery mud.

And there's a bunch of dragonflies flying above the field. Looks like a bunch of mosquitoes too. And she walks me out to this big field. And she was going there every morning and every evening outside the heat of the day and trying to save whatever cotton she could from the harvest. She's got a bunch of cotton in her hands. And what makes it bad? of cotton in her hands. And what makes it bad?

Okay, so she's showing me some balls of cotton that have like brown on them, a little bit of black. She's saying this is the bad cotton, this is the cotton that's ruined, it's not good. She's going stock to stock and just kind of finding any of these small cotton balls, picking them apart to find the bits that were still white and weren't ruined by insects or going stock to stock and just kind of finding any of these small cotton balls, picking them apart to find the bits that were still white and weren't ruined by insects or brown from the flood water. Oh, I'm getting stuck. Does she think this water, does she think it will recede by October when she needs to plant? Okay, so she's saying that we're looking at this very muddy, it's like, you know, it's kind of green sloshing mud with water that's up to my calves. And she's saying that even if the water

recedes in time, she doesn't think it will be good enough to plant wheat in a month or two because the ground is not good now. And she was saying how basically every penny right now counts because whatever she can save of that cotton, whatever she can sell, she's expecting that that might be all the money she has for the next year from her harvests. Okay. Okay. Thank you, Padma. Thank you. And Padma had told me how she was already worried that she was going to be up to her hair in debt. She had taken out one loan to plant the cotton harvest that was now mostly ruined.

She knew that she'd probably have to take out another loan to plant any wheat, and she might not get a payday for the wheat harvest this spring. And that's a reality that millions of farmers across Pakistan are suddenly faced with right now. They're looking into their future, and for the next couple of months, and maybe even years, all they're seeing is debt. And they're wondering, how are they going to have any money to feed their families?

Right. In every conceivable way, they are about to be very much underwater. That's right. We'll be right back. So, Christina, after you visit with these farmers, where do you go next? So, we're in a town called Shadakot, and we're just getting to a school where a lot of people here who have been displaced from their farmland have been taking refuge. So we drove to a town a couple of hours away called Chidagkat. And when we got there... High school.

High school. Okay. Girls' high school. We went to this girls' high school, which had been turned into a kind of ad hoc shelter for people whose homes had been destroyed. for people whose homes had been destroyed. And we walk into the school, and it's about 120 degrees. Somehow it feels even hotter than the other parts of that district. There are these swarms of flies everywhere. There are kids laying on these kind of rope beds that are typical in this part of Pakistan.

It's crowded with 1,500 people. There are some cattle and goats that are wandering around the courtyard. And as we walk in, people start thinking that maybe because I'm a foreigner that we're aid workers. And huge crowds of people start gathering around us. And I met this one woman, Reshma, who was about 20 years old. She had four kids, all under the age of four. And she was carrying her two-year-old on her hip.

Okay, so she says that they were in their house when the rain began. So they grabbed a rickshaw, they came here, and they came to the school because they heard that people were gathering at the women's school for shelter. And she had come to the school back in 2010, when the rains hit the area then. And so she decided to come back to the school now. And she was kind of joking about how the 2010 floods trained her well for this moment. And she was saying that, you know, life in the school was really rough. And she was saying that, you know, life in the school was really rough.

There's a lot of mosquitoes. There's not electricity, so at night it's completely dark except for a few candles that they light. And she was sleeping on the floor with her kids in one of these classrooms. But she was saying, you know, where else can we go? What other options do we have? She wasn't really getting any food during the day. And every day her kids were crying and crying and begging her to give them something. And she was just heartbroken because she had nothing to give. And at one point she was saying, you know, maybe we shouldn't have come here.

When she was here in 2010, were they getting rations at that time? And she described to me how back here in 2010, these huge trucks used to come to the school every couple of days. And everyone would line up in this orderly line. They would get these food rations. They would check their names off of the list. And that sustained them for months while they waited for the floodwater to go down and to go back to their homes and rebuild their homes. And why isn't there comparable aid this time, given the scale of these floods?

So part of the reason is that back in 2010, there were a lot of these huge international NGOs that were active throughout most of Pakistan. And they were the kind of big organizations that are kind of set up for exactly this sort of crisis. of set up for exactly this sort of crisis. You know, a massive disaster happens and they have the infrastructure and the funding and the local partners to just jump into action. But a year after the 2010 floods in 2011, you'll remember that the U.S. killed Osama bin Laden in a raid in Pakistan. And as part of that effort, the CIA had used a vaccination campaign as a front to identify where bin Laden was. Then in the aftermath, as Pakistani authorities realized that the CIA had used a vaccination campaign to identify him, they started cracking down on a lot of those international NGOs, which they suddenly eyed with a lot of suspicion. You know, some organizations were expelled.

They put so many restrictions on others that they left because they couldn't do their work. And so by the time these floods came, this massive infrastructure that was set up to handle a crisis like this had been gutted. Those organizations just weren't here anymore. So a very unexpected reason that there's not food and water and medicine being given out in this moment

is because of the way that the United States used a non-profit group to help carry out the assassination of Osama bin Laden. In a large way, yeah. You know, it's part of the reason that at least the immediate response has been so slow. And why weeks into this crisis, a lot of these people are on their own.

And already, you're starting to see this other health crisis unfolding because of the floods. And that's malaria and dengue. So usually every monsoon season, you have this slight uptick in both of those diseases. You know, they're diseases that come from water and mosquitoes and wherever there's a lot of rain, there'll be more mosquitoes breeding and spreading both. But this year, because there is so much stagnant water across such a large part of the country, and it's not going anywhere, the mosquitoes are breeding very quickly. And people are stuck in

tents or other makeshift shelters, and they don't have the mosquito nets they usually use to protect themselves. And so already in hospitals, you're seeing this massive influx of people, especially kids, who are sick with malaria and dengue and other waterborne diseases from the floods. So once again, we're seeing how these floods compound the very crises that they create. So how is the medical system in Pakistan now coping with all this illness? How is the medical system in Pakistan now coping with all this illness? So to understand that, I went back to Dadu. And we stopped at the local hospital there to see how people were doing. And we walked into the children's ward.

And there were kids just crammed onto beds, two or three kids to every bed. They were coughing. A lot of the kids were crying. We saw nurses in white outfits dashing around because all of these parents were trying to get their attention to get their kids help. And the head doctor told me that they used to see around 1,500 patients in a day. And now they were seeing 3,000 to even 5,000 patients coming in with malaria or dengue or other illnesses related to the floods. And one of the people who we had met in Dadu told me that this was especially an issue for these villages that had become islands that were, you know, hours-long boat rides away. And he knew of this one mother who had lost her daughter to malaria because they couldn't get her help in time.

So we got back onto the boat, and we went out to go talk to her. So we're in a village that's been completely surrounded by water. And we're walking to the home of a mother whose 10-year-old daughter, Iman, died about a week ago from malaria. So we arrived at this small village and we're kind of trudging through the mud to get to her mud brick home. A lot of the homes have had walls collapse or roof collapse. And there are these piles of bricks and tarps draped across where a wall used to be.

And what's her name? Nasiba. Nasiba. Nasiba. Her name is Nasiba. She said she was around 28 or 29, and she had six children and grew up in that village. And she was sitting on a rope bed in the courtyard just outside her house that had been partially destroyed by the floods.

And she told me about how maybe two weeks after the floods came to their village, and the village was completely marooned, her 10-year-old daughter, Irman, was sitting in the courtyard. And she looked over, and it was clear that she wasn't doing very well. First she did vomiting, and then she became unconscious. First she what? Vomiting. And then suddenly she started vomiting. And she passed out.

And Asiba touched her forehead, and it was burning up like she had a bad fever. And immediately she knew what this was. These were signs of malaria. And so she called her husband and told him what was happening and that they needed to get to a hospital right now. So her husband found a boat to come pick them up, brought them to an embankment, and he drove them to the hospital. That's usually 20 minutes away, but because the highways were washed out, it took three hours.

And can she tell me what happened when they got to Sewan Hospital? And her daughter was admitted to that hospital. She still wasn't regaining consciousness. And Nasiba was there, sitting next to her, patting her head, patting her arms. And telling her to please wake up, please wake up, because she was really worried that she had been unconscious this long. So she was sitting with her on the bed, and she was not taking a breath. The doctor came, and they put some machine on it.

And as Naseeba was sitting at her bedside, just stroking her forehead, her daughter passed away. Wow. I'm back on the water. forehead, her daughter passed away. Wow. It's my duty, but I could not, my water was, I cannot control the water. And as she was telling me this, she started to cry. And she was saying, you know, I'm a mom.

It's a mother's duty to protect her kids, but how can I protect them against nature, against floods like this? Thank you. Shukria. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry for your loss. Then she told me how when they got back to their village,

they also had this other challenge. The cemetery where most of their relatives were buried was submerged in water. So I asked her brother to take me to the cemetery so I could see where they finally buried her. And we got in this small rickety boat and took it to a cemetery that was still covered in water. So we're walking through the graveyard of this one village. And you can still see there are these kind of mounds of graves that people have put stones

all across the top of. And in parts of the graveyard that are a bit lower, you can see just kind of bumps in the mud where graves used to be. And he led me up the small hill. Where is she, Barry? The under the tree. Can we go see? Yeah. he's showing us how he managed to find the spot that's just up on a small hill and it's underneath the shade of a tree and that's where they managed to find a bit of dry land to bury her

and her grave is just a kind of mound of dirt. They've placed a pink and red and green piece of cloth over top of it. There's a few bricks that are holding the cloth down. And just in front of that hill, the rest of the graveyard is completely submerged in water. There's these little mounds that used to be graves that are poking out just from the top of this kind of green flood water. And in front of those is this red brick building that was the elementary school where the girl, Iman, went to school. And it was really heartbreaking. You know, this woman had survived crisis after crisis after crisis. Her home was partially destroyed by the floods.

There's already malaria spreading to her other relatives. Her one daughter was sick. She was saying her mother was sick too. And then to not even be able to easily find land to bury her daughter who had passed away. You know, I was just thinking, how much more can these people lose? Christina, I'm struck in hearing you describe these scenes not just by the devastation of the flood itself, which is extraordinary, but by just how much destruction and devastation

has come after and since the flood. Exactly. I mean, what struck me was how usually when these kinds of disasters hit, we focus on the immediate crisis that we see, you know, those dramatic images of waves crashing through bridges and washing away hotels. But what became clear as I was reporting was that this is a crisis

that's happening in waves, and will continue to hit for months and maybe even years to come. You know, first comes the floods, where nearly 1,500 people died just from the floodwater washing through. Homes were ruined. Millions of people were displaced. Then in the immediate aftermath comes the next wave, the waterborne diseases, the malaria, the dengue that takes more lives. The starvation. The starvation. The things that overburden hospitals that just can't handle the sudden influx of patients. And then on top of that, this farmland is ruined. So farmers might not be able to plant the wheat that's harvested this spring and that feeds the entire country. So that's another wave that's going to hit next year when you could see a massive food crisis unfolding. So as much as this is a disaster of scale, it's much more than just a flood.

It's this crisis after crisis after crisis that's going to keep reverberating throughout Pakistan for possibly years to come. Well, Christina, thank you we appreciate it thanks for having me we'll be right back. Herschel Walker was engulfed in controversy on Tuesday amid a report that he had paid for a girlfriend's abortion in 2009, despite being an outspoken supporter of banning abortion, with no exceptions.

But I can tell you right now, I never asked anyone to get an abortion. I never paid for an abortion, and it's a lie. Walker, who is running against Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, vigorously denied the claim, first reported by the Daily Beast. But the magazine said that the former girlfriend had produced documentation of Walker's role, including a 2009 receipt from the abortion clinic, a signed get-well card from Walker, and evidence of a $700 check said to be from Walker to cover the cost of the abortion. Adding to Walker's political woes, his son, Christian, released a scathing video accusing Walker of being an absentee father who has repeatedly lied about his personal life, including,

his son alleged, Walker's denial of the abortion. The abortion card drops yesterday. It's literally his handwriting in the card. They say they have receipts, whatever. He gets on Twitter. He lies about it. Okay, I'm done. Done. Everything has been a lie. And former President Donald Trump

has asked the United States Supreme Court to intervene in the case of the classified documents seized by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago in his latest attempt to block the federal government's investigation. But Trump faces significant challenges. Even though the Supreme Court is dominated by six conservative justices, it has rejected earlier efforts by Trump to stop the disclosure of information about him. Today's episode was produced by Michael Simon-Johnson and Rochelle Banja, with help from Sydney Harper, Muj Zaddi, and Asta Chaturvedi. It was edited by M.J. Davis-Lynn, contains original music by Daniel Powell and Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.