With a swollen stomach, aching feet and her four-year-old daughter in tow, Fahmidah Bibi is on the lookout for a doctor who is rumored to be expecting a visit to the campsite she now calls home after being forced to flee her village due to flooding .

The camp on the site of a small train station on the outskirts of Fazilpur in the Pakistani province of Punjab is the only hill in a water landscape and accommodates around 500 people.

Among them is 40-year-old Fahmidah, who arrived just over a week ago with her five children along with her husband’s relatives.

“I need a doctor or midwife. What if something happens to my child?” Fahmidah – nine months pregnant and due any day – told AFP over the weekend.

More than 33 million people in Pakistan have been affected by the floods caused by record monsoon rains that have also claimed at least 1,300 lives, according to the government.

The United Nations Population Fund said on Saturday that at least 128,000 pregnant women in the flood-hit areas are in need of urgent assistance – 42,000 are expected to give birth in the next three months.

Fahmidah’s last doctor’s visit was a month ago, and according to her report, which she keeps with a prescription for medication she can’t afford, her baby is in breech presentation.

She sleeps outdoors, sharing a traditional wooden charpoy bed with her five children, aged four to twelve.

At least five other pregnant women live on the sprawling makeshift station campsite.

They all complain about a lack of doctors and midwives to help them.

Most women have resisted being examined by volunteer male doctors who have come on aid convoys. In conservative Pakistan, it is often considered inappropriate for women to consult male doctors, particularly on gynecological matters.

Desperate for attention, Fahmidah attempted to slash across flooded fields to reach the city for help, but slipped and fell several times and finally gave up.

She turns pale at the thought of giving birth at the campsite, where stranded villagers and their livestock live side by side with no sanitation.

The buzzing of flies and mosquitoes is incessant, as is the stench of the surrounding murky brown water, filled with rotting vegetation and excrement.

“I haven’t prepared anything for when the baby comes,” Fahmidah said.

“I don’t even have diapers. It was all washed away in the tide.”

Like Fahmidah, Saira Bibi, who is five months pregnant, is desperately looking for a doctor – she has sharp pains in the side of her stomach.

Saira, who is only 25, already has four daughters, but is under pressure from her husband and his family to father a son. He has threatened to get another woman if she fails him again.

“I had a son after four daughters but he died,” she told AFP, adding that she then underwent 10 months of fertility treatment to get pregnant again.

Now her desperate situation has jeopardized her chances of bringing this pregnancy to an end.

As Saira prays to successfully give birth to a healthy boy, Fahmidah already knows that she will give birth to a son.

She has decided to name him Ali Raza, hoping he will grow up to be a key government official and take her on a pilgrimage.

“I know that he will take his mother to Mecca,” she says.