WUNRN
Women's Feature Service
By Zofeen T. Ebrahim
Around 70,000 displaced are lodged in the 22 camps in Karachi,
and the numbers are increasing. (Credit: Ahim Siddiqi\WFS)
Khairpur alone has
seen an influx of some 1,50,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) due to the
recent floods. It has been almost two months since the rising river waters
submerged one-fifth of
When Shah visited the
camps she observed that most women there were malnourished. "The sad part
was that many were still breast-feeding, even though there was no milk,"
she recalls. Whichever camp she and her team visited, between 20 to 25 per cent
women were pregnant. Dr Sajjad Ahmed, who is managing a battalion of midwives
that have been deputed by the Pakistan Medical Association's (PMA)
According to him,
there is an urgent need for folic acid supplements for pregnant women and milk
for nursing mothers. "We need milk for nursing mothers. Giving powdered
formula milk will only complicate matters as the women will not know how to
prepare it, and getting clean water is a huge challenge." The thinking is
that if nursing mothers are provided milk they will, in turn, be able to
breastfeed.
In the face of a
broken down health system it has been difficult to provide these women with
even the basics, but efforts are on. The PMA, in collaboration with the SOGP
and United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), has formed teams comprising two
midwives, one male nurse and one doctor to visit these camps. Nagina Ilyas, who
supervises these teams, says, "If the camps are bigger, like the 500
Quarters in Hawkesbay tented camp, some 20 kilometres from the
But there are
problems aplenty. Like a shortage of doctors, especially female doctors.
"Female doctors are badly needed as women IDPs refuse to get checked by
male doctors," says Ahmed. One midwife, who is a part of these care teams,
offers an explanation for this hesitation to volunteer, "It's not easy to
come here every day. It's hot; there is no washroom and the ones setup for the
community are filthy."
Working in
schools-turned-camps is tougher. "The classrooms are packed with about 30
or 40 people and flies are swarming all around. Most of the displaced are ill.
A lot of them have scabies; others have eye-infections or open wounds; many
have Hepatitis C and even tuberculosis (TB). Most children are suffering from
diarrhoea," says Ilyas, overwhelmed by so much suffering around her.
Around 70,000 are
lodged in the 22 camps in
The UNFPA also has
established 36-fully equipped service delivery points for pregnant women. These
include 23 mobile service units and 14 existing government health facilities
across
Direct interventions
apart, the UNFPA is also conducting reproductive health training and offering
supplies to non-governmental service providers. "It is vital to provide
life-saving reproductive health facilities for the benefit of mothers and
babies. We only need six million dollars to cover 5,00,000 births, and only 20
per cent of this has been financed. What we need is, in fact, just $12 per
birth. Only $12, to ensure the health and safety of a mother and her baby,"
says Maurizio Giuliano, spokesperson for the Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in
Adds a young midwife
who visits the 500 Quarters camp daily, "For those who are pregnant or
have just delivered, sometimes all we need is bedding or even a clean sheet for
them to sleep on. There have been many instances when we have seen mothers
sleeping on the floor without even a straw mat. Naturally, she and even her new
born baby will catch infections."
While morbidity and
mortality were tragically high even before the floods, calamities often put
women at a much greater risk of getting pregnant, says Dr Shershah Syed, a
noted gynaecologist in
According to Ilyas,
"It's quite normal to see women with 10 to 11 kids." Take Roza
Barkat, who hails from a village in Jacobabad. It is her 11th pregnancy and she
is in her seventh month. The 30-something, who is camped in a government school
in Kemari area of
But Shah sees a
"silver lining" in all this chaos. It has brought women like Amirah
and Roza to healthcare professionals, thereby providing them with an
opportunity to break the cycle of frequent pregnancies. "We can provide
them the much-needed family planning (FP) services," she says.
"We are cajoling
women who have between 10 and 14 children, to go in for a tubal ligation, but
it is an uphill task. Apart from the language barrier, they just freak out when
we tell them it's an operation. The next job is convincing the husband, which
is a time-consuming task," says Ilyas.
These are tough times
for the average Pakistani woman, on whom falls the responsibility of keeping
the family together even as she tries to rebuild her life from scratch. As for
those who are expecting or have given birth recently, what would otherwise have
been a happy time has become a nightmare today.