Only wooden beams and bricks remain from Nadeem’s house in Pakistan

• Aletta Andre

  India correspondent

At the site of Nadeem Kakar’s house in the Hanna Urak valley in Baluchistan province, nothing was left standing. There are wooden beams, a few bricks, branches and above all a lot of dust.

Nadeem is one of six brothers, two of whom live with their mother. The other four are married and had their own house with their families. Now the five houses have been destroyed. “We have nothing left, nothing at all,” he told reporter Hafiz Ullah Sherani, who visited the area for NOS.

Baluchistan has been hit hard by the floods that have hit Pakistan since June. And this while the annual monsoon generally skips this poor province. In Hanna Urak, a valley near the provincial capital of Quetta, it rained continuously for two days late last month. Much of the water has since been drained.

Nadeem and his brothers take stock. They dusted off a few pillows, hollowed out a metal door, and placed the refrigerator by the side of the road. They have been given a tent to sleep in, but they have almost nothing to eat. “We received food aid once, but nothing else.”

A truckload of relief supplies is delivered. But that’s not enough, says Shabeer Ahmed Kakar, an employee of the local aid organization Mercy Corp. “People have a lot of problems, health and agriculture. Schools are closed indefinitely. People don’t have enough to eat. And the irony is that even when people get food aid, they don’t have the resources to eat the food”. . prepare it, or plates to eat it.”

Cooked food is being distributed in some camps, but near Nadeem people have been given uncooked rice.

Apple trees, the main source of income in this valley, are also largely felled to the ground. There are still damaged apples around. This is a major economic loss, says village chief Kaleem Ullah Kakar. “Our trees typically bring in about $180 per tree per year,” he says.

About 10,000 people live in the valley. Here alone, 50,000 apple trees were destroyed. “We have to replant them. But it takes six years for a sapling to first bear fruit. And then it takes a few more years for the annual yield to increase. In terms of apple production, the loss for this area is around 11. “million euros”, specifies Kaleem Ullah Kakar.

It will therefore take years to rebuild this sector. Across the country, according to Pakistan’s Climate Minister Shelly Rehman, nearly half of all crops have been lost. And Pakistan was already struggling with high food inflation before the floods. The Pakistani government estimates the economic damage across the country at $10 billion and again appealed for help from the international community this weekend.

Nadeem Kakar and his brother are not expecting this. They started clearing the rubble so they could rebuild their homes themselves. “We only had these five houses,” he says. They worry about possible new floods, but they have no choice. “We don’t have land elsewhere. Our only option is to rebuild our houses in the same place.”