Wrapped tightly in the shelter of a donated tent, a newborn baby lies still amidst the clutter all around.
Her mother, Hajira Bibi, flirts between finding the 10-day-old girl – so young that her name is not yet given – and trying to clean up the ankle-deep mud left behind by the floods that are affecting her Family forced to take shelter on the shoulder of a freeway.
“I took her on the motorway when she was only four days old…she was so small,” Bibi told AFP about her evacuation over the weekend.
“She was sick and her eyes hurt, she also had a fever, my baby was struggling a lot because of the heat.”
Similar scenes are playing out across Pakistan after record monsoon rains that have inundated a third of the country and affected more than 33 million people.
According to UNICEF, 16 million children have been affected and 3.4 million are in need of humanitarian assistance.
Bibi, still recovering from the birth, had to be helped up the steep slope when warnings came that the Kabul River would burst due to torrential rain further north.
In this village near Charsadda in north-west Pakistan, the sun was beating down as they fled to A-frame tents that were being distributed to families.
– mud everywhere –
They slept there for days under the open sky, without fans, without running water and without mosquito repellent.
When the shoulder-high tide receded, a dark brown mud had covered everything in their three-bedroom house and their feet sank into it.
“We just want our house fixed. It hurts to see the children lying here,” said Bibi, who hopes that a doctor will reach the extended family of around 15.
In rural parts of Pakistan it is common for birthdays not to be accurately recorded, but Bibi believes the baby was born around four days before the floods and is now around 10 days old.
Unsure of her exact age, she estimates it to be around 18 – quietly explaining that she was only about 12 when she gave birth to her first baby.
They have now moved their tents to drier ground outside their home, the children share wooden charpoy beds.
The environment is ripe for an outbreak of infection.
The water pump is broken so the adults haven’t showered with clean water for almost a week.
Children swim in the small flood pools where buffalo bathe and urinate.
“The flood is over but the water was very dirty, very muddy, all these children have rashes and their health is getting worse,” said Naveed Afzal, Bibi’s husband, who has been unable to find work as a day laborer since the flood.
On their feet and shins, adults show sores that they say have tripled in size in just a few days.
A little boy has teary red eyes, another has a fever.
At least the baby is washed in the few bottles of mineral water that are collected at donation points that the men have to walk to for hours every day.
Many connecting roads were cut off by standing flood water.
“I haven’t given up hope yet, but this little girl is so small that it would be better to go home and settle down,” Bibi said, cradling the baby in her arms.
