A home is a place called safe heaven. The foundation of any house is not only laid by tiring labour but hopes, dreams, and comfort to live in it for the rest of one’s life. It is decorated with love, affection is hung on the walls like some colourful paintings, and a sweet smell of warmth revolves around the house.
Imagine sleeping in the warmth of your comfortable bed in your forever home and you wake up to an alarm that a catastrophe is just around the corner. It is coming at an accelerated speed ready to destroy, shatter and swipe away the home of your dreams leaving you with nothing but a site of absolute destruction and tragedy and there is absolutely nothing that can be done to turn around the MIGHTY FLOODS. You sit in a corner and watch your home getting destroyed in just a matter of seconds if you are not too lucky to hear the alarm.
Monsoon in Pakistan is always chaotic. It’s a time when the rich are busy enjoying their fried food on their expensive trollies in their ever more expensive balcony where the flooring is from Italy, and the poor are collecting their leftover belongings that the flood spared, and are grateful for it. The monsoon brings about traffic jams, power cut out for hours, gas shortages, broken roads, and buildings crumbling down. It doesn’t spare the Walled City of Lahore or the DHA.
The minister of climate change said that Pakistan received 87 percent heavier rain than average. The country all around is filled with poor sewage and drainage system resulting in the destruction that the floods cause. According to the National Disaster Management Authority, more than 1000 people have died in these floods and hundreds and thousands have been displaced. Baluchistan has been the most destroyed moving already poor people to the brink of poverty. According to the Provincial Disaster Management Authority, 200 people have died in the province and thousands have been displaced. In Siam Ullah, District Khairpur over 200 houses were destroyed by the flood. The floods have deeply scared the areas such as Quetta, Pishin, Qila Saif Ullah, Ziarat, Zhob, Loralai, Noshki, and Naseerabad. According to Federal Flood Commission forecasted high-level flooding in the coming days in the Punjab area too.
What will happen once the floods settle down? Nothing! Because this is not the first time that this kind of destruction has happened in Pakistan and this is not the last time because we tend to forget as a nation and the leaders tend to forget as the forgetful leaders they are. There are relief camps made and support is provided to the ones in need but how do you compensate for the loss of their houses, their land which brings them money for survival, and their lives? And where do they exactly go once relief camps die down? What happens when people forget and go back to the mundane stuff of their lives? I guess the loss of a home is only felt when the home is taken from one.
Once again failed government strategies to combat floods, poor sewage, and drainage system of the provinces, wrong use of the resource, and zero city planning. This shows how incapable the ones we voted for are.
