Emine Erdoğan, the wife of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is scheduled to visit flood-devastated Pakistan next week to present donations raised at a charity dinner in Istanbul.
The Turkish Businesswomen’s Association is planning an “iftar” dinner, the evening fast-breaking meal during the holy month of Ramadan, in Istanbul on Friday to raise funds to contribute to the Pakistan flood-relief effort, which is facing increasingly dire challenges.
The floods began almost a month ago with hammering monsoon rains in northwestern Pakistan and have swept southward. Many of the people cut off from help are in the mountainous northwest, where roads and bridges have been swept away. The United Nations said Tuesday that the floods have isolated about 800,000 people in Pakistan who are now only reachable by air and that aid workers need at least 40 more helicopters to ferry lifesaving aid to the increasingly desperate survivors, the Associated Press reported.
The appeal Tuesday was an indication of the massive problems facing the relief effort in Pakistan more than three weeks after the floods hit the country, affecting more than 17 million people and raising concerns about possible social unrest and political instability.
The Turkish prime minister’s wife, accompanied by a large number of businesswomen and women from civil-society organizations, will visit flood victims in Pakistan next week to present the donations raised at the dinner. Many prominent figures from the political, diplomatic and artistic worlds are expected to join Emine Erdoğan in attending the charity iftar, the Anatolia news agency reported Wednesday.
Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani earlier said hundreds of health facilities had been damaged and tens of thousands of medical workers displaced, while the country’s chief meteorologist warned it would be two weeks until the Indus River – the focus of the flooding still sweeping through the country – returns to normal levels.
Chief meteorologist Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry said high tides in the Arabian Sea would slow the drainage of the Indus into it, but that those tides would begin changing Wednesday and the Indus would reach peak flood stage late this week. “The flood situation is not yet over,” Chaudhry said.
The Turkish Prime Ministry said Monday that more than 9 million Turkish Liras have been collected thus far within the framework of an aid campaign to help Pakistan.
In addition to that sum, $338,527 and 361,995 euros had been collected as of Monday in three separate bank accounts opened under a directive from the Turkish prime minister, a written statement from the Prime Ministry’s Directorate General for Disaster and Emergency Management said.
The United States has deployed at least 18 helicopters that are flying regular relief missions, but the United Nations said it would need at least 40 more heavy-lift choppers working at full capacity to reach the estimated 800,000 people stranded in Pakistan.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that about 700,000 Pakistanis have been forced into makeshift settlements in the southern province of Sindh alone.
While there have been no major disease outbreaks as a result of the floods, aid agencies are increasingly worried, saying contaminated water and a lack of proper sanitation were already causing a spike in medical problems in camps for the displaced.
“Pakistan and its people are experiencing the worst natural calamity of its history,” Prime Minister Gilani said at a meeting on health issues in the flood zone. “As human misery continues to mount, we are seriously concerned about the spread of epidemic diseases.”
More than 3.5 million children are at risk from waterborne diseases, he said, and skin diseases, respiratory infections and malnutrition are spreading in flooded areas. The problem is compounded by the flood’s impact on the country's medical system – which has long been badly overstretched and underfunded.
Gilani said the floods had damaged more than 200 health facilities, and that about one-third of the country’s 100,000 female health workers had been displaced. Those health workers provide the main primary medical care to millions of rural Pakistani women.
