Emergency relief

St Elizabeth Hospital medical staff attend to flood victims in Sindh province. Photo:Fr Robert McCullochSt Elizabeth Hospital medical staff attend to flood victims in Sindh province. Photo:Fr Robert McCulloch

One-third of Pakistan is still flooded after the record rainfall of August this year. Sindh, the southern province, received 442.8 mm of rain in August, 726% more than the monthly average. The monsoon failed last year in Sindh, so the land was baked hard and dry, causing the new monsoon rains this year to become an instant flood and the Indus River to drown cities, towns and villages. This has presented Pakistan with a huge financial crisis. In the last nine months, Pakistan has been trying to avoid economic breakdown and deal with an unsustainable debt burden due to oil and ING (International Netherlands Group) import costs. Now the floods have destroyed its agricultural base for at least a year. The human cost cannot be calculated. More than 30 million people have fled their homes. They fear returning to what little remains of what they had, and in the meantime, they have an immediate need for shelter, food and sustained emergency healthcare.

The government depends on international assistance. The army is mobilised for rescue work and food distribution when it arrives. The Federal Climate Change Minister, Sherry Rehman, reports that Pakistan needs immediate and substantial healthcare assistance.

St Elizabeth Hospital, Hyderabad, is responding to this healthcare emergency in southern interior Sindh along the Indus River through its well-organised Mobile Medical Outreach Programme (MMOP). Since August 29, the doctors and nurses of MMOP have cared for 3,341 patients, all of whom have received free medicine. Serious medical and surgical cases and women in the final stages of pregnancy are taken to St Elizabeth Hospital and admitted for free care. The two hospital doctors in the MMOP team are Muslim, and the five nurses, male and female, are Christian. The patients they care for may be Muslim, Christian or Hindu. All are equally poor and suffering.

Recently, 291 patients were cared for in the ruins of a Christian village. Their village was not destroyed by floods but by government action in 2021 because it was declared to be illegally built. Now the floods have swept away everything of the little they had left.

Statistics cannot describe the real situations of people in grinding poverty and the despair that floods bring about. Every day the mobile medical team heads out from Hyderabad to settlements where people need emergency care. Many have moved into shacks on the roads because their villages remain submerged. They suffer from every manner of health issues. Many suffer from skin diseases - others from eye and ear infections, gastroenteritis, chest infections, infected wounds, malaria and an increasing number from dengue fever. All dengue fever sufferers are taken to St Elizabeth Hospital for free admission and treatment. The MMOP team also supplies bottled drinking water and mosquito nets to try to control the malaria and dengue threats. Every day the 4WD off-road vehicle sets out loaded with medicines, drinking water and mosquito nets.

St Elizabeth Hospital’s costs for this emergency healthcare are enormous and beyond its annual budget. The hospital receives no government assistance even though the government authorities recognise the frontline work it does. The vehicle used by the MMOP team will need replacing before long to enable the hospital to continue this emergency medical care.

Through St Elizabeth Hospital and its MMOP, the Catholic Church is at the forefront of responding to this catastrophic medical emergency in Hyderabad and the interior Sindh. St Elizabeth Hospital was there during the disastrous flood of 2010, which ravaged Pakistan and Sindh, although to a lesser degree than this year, and it is there now to assist the people of Sindh province, again ravaged by these disastrous floods. This presence, of course, is due to the kind and generous support of all our friends and benefactors, who we know will be there with us once again.

Columban Fr Robert McCulloch worked in Pakistan for 34 years.

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