Reply #11: Behind the photograph: the human face of Pakistan's deadly flood

[OhioChick]

Mother of the child in image that went around the world tells of her family's struggle



It was an image that conveyed the human cost of the Pakistani floods – and the failure to deliver aid to those affected – more powerfully than any statistic: four young children lying on a filthy patchwork quilt, one of them sucking on an empty yellow bottle, all of them covered by flies.

The photograph by Associated Press's Mohammad Sajjad went around the world and featured in the Guardian's Eyewitness slot last week. The Guardian identified the child with the bottle as two-year-old Reza Khan and tracked him down to a makeshift camp at a roadside in Azakhel, some 19 miles from Peshawar, the capital of the insurgency-plagued province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, bordering Afghanistan.

The camp is a hotchpotch of about two dozen tents donated by various aid organisations, but it is run by none. Its residents must fend for themselves, and rely on the charity of passersby. There are 19 families here, all of them Afghan refugees: people who were displaced once by conflict in their homeland have now been displaced again by the month-long deluge.

Reza's family is from Butkhak, near the Afghan capital, Kabul. His father fled the area as a young boy, some 30 years ago, to escape the cycle of foreign occupation and internecine battles plaguing his homeland.


More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/05/pakistan-floods-photograph-children