Thousands stay in floods to protect homes

[Lahore_Real_Estate]

* Flood victims say they cannot leave their belongings for looters

* Villagers sleeping on rooftops due to high water across flood zone

HAMDANI LEGARI: The old man stepped carefully through his village, dodging craters as deep as graves where they had been mining soil for embankments to hold back the floodwaters. Already, nearly half this village of tenant farmers had been destroyed. The crops wiped out.

But Mohammed Ayoub and his neighbours weren’t leaving, not unless all the mud houses collapsed. It wasn’t about pride, or a farmer’s love for his village or the land he sows. It was a straightforward financial equation: They couldn’t afford to lose what little they had left.

If, to an outsider, their belongings might look inconsequential – some goats, a couple buffalos, cheap metal cooking pots and transistor radios – it was everything to them. And with no way to take their possessions with them, they were not going to leave them for the looters.

Across the flood zone, thousands – perhaps hundreds of thousands – of people have decided to stay in their homes, often sleeping on rooftops because of the high water. Stranded on tiny islands a few inches above the water line and refusing offers of rescue, they are reflections of Pakistan today: its widespread poverty and the collapse of the traditional bonds between landlords and tenants. “The women were scared before we sent them away, and we’re scared now,” said Ayoub, a thin, courtly man with a white mustache wearing a dirt-stained shalwar kameez. He was one of about 30 men who remained as guardians and to build up the embankments in case of more flooding.

About 400 villagers have already fled. “How can we all leave? “We have to stay here if we want to protect what we own,” he said. Another farmer, a young man, spoke up: “We’re not scared of dying,” Ghulam Raza said loudly. “We’re scared of losing everything we have,” he said.

A 40-year-old Nazir Ahmed, a deeply exhausted man who lived with his wife and six children in a two-room home on the edge of Hamdani Legari. He tried, in the first days after the floods, to build embankments against the water. But his land was just too low. Now he points towards the water to show where he raised his family, indicating a 10-foot mud pillar and a jumble of metal rods.

Hamdani Legari, like most villages here, can seem a place from another century, with its houses and grain bins made of mud and its scarcity of store-bought goods. It’s a place where few people earn more than a few hundred dollars per year, and where for generations the families of tenant farmers have been tied to the families of their landlords – working their fields in exchange for half the harvest.

After these floods, the landlords of Hamdani Legari loaded his household goods into a metal trailer. Then using the village’s only tractor, he slowly towed everything he owned to the shoreline. No one was surprised he left.