Ocean Views and What Monsoons in Pakistan Mean

Just got back to my dorm room at AKU a couple of hours ago from my weekend at our good family friends'. This morning, Uncle S took me out for a drive post-crashing rain storms of last night. There were layers of dead rain flies everywhere. The humidity from all the rainfall trying to re-evaporate was crazy. And as we drove around in the comfort of the 4x4, I observed what had happened to the world outside my sheltered haven in Clifton, literally overnight.

Firstly, power is out across the city and is not expected to go back up for another 24 hours -we were lucky to have a generator at their home, and also at AKU. Secondly, the streets are seriously flooded -apparently, people on the roads last night had water up to their knees in their cars. Many were stranded, floating in the street. Surely, there were many wipe-outs of scooters / motorcycles that just don't have the surface area and traction to deal with driving through 'rivers'. Some 20-something people have been reported dead since the storm yesterday, and of course, I'm willing to bet there's more dead in the shanty-town / slums... drownings, several dead because power lines have fallen all over the place and live wires have done their own dangerous damage. Trees have fallen. The poorest lose their homes. The financial district of the city still has totally flooded streets. And in these urban rivers, you can see children playing half-naked in the dirty water. The sewage and pollution stench has grown stronger and surely all this mess is a perfect breeding ground for disease... apparently increase in diarrheal disease, including cholera, is not uncommon during the monsoon season here.

And yet, you hear of people in the streets raising their eyes to the grey skies above and thanking God for the blessing of rain. This city is otherwise a desert the rest of the year round. There had been water shortages across Karachi just before. So... it's kind of a simultaneous blessing and curse. What's the real curse is that the city has no infrastructure to deal with the monsoon... it's really just like a really bad rainstorm back home... what makes it such a 'natural disaster' is the lack of a proper sewer system and drainage in the city, and the governments of both Karachi and Pakistan in general don't give a damn about the costs of human lives, public health, safety, general well-being of the people of this country. There are so-called allocated funds for city infrastructure, but there's so much corruption here that the money never makes it to where it was allocated. And human life has no value here. If you drown, or get electricuted, or whatever, who's going to know? You know the population of Karachi alone is 17 million (more than half the population of Canada... and a couple million larger than Istanbul)? Pakistan is about 174 million or something. And then you go into these slums and you see these families of 9, 10, 11 kids... and really it's no wonder. It's almost like the mentality is, "well, so it's God's will whether we lose a kid to that storm, or this disease, and God's will whether we can just produce some replacements..." -it's really very sad.

Anyway, so we drove around the city again and Uncle S gave me a little history lesson about Karachi... it's growth from a small port village -Kharadar (meaning "salt gate" because it faced the sea) is the original port, and oldest part of Karachi -into what it is today, with increasing reclaimed land... and then we drove by the ocean view and that was absolutely spectacular. There were men with their monkeys on a leash, who apparently, for a small sum of money, can make their monkeys do all kinds of acrobatics. And I was told that there are snake charmers, with cobras that get hypnotized and go into a trance-like dance to the vibrations of a particular flute played by the charmer (but I did not see any there in the early afternoon!). There were lots of camels and horses trotting along the beach, which you can ride if you pay a fee, as well. I had thought I'd love to ride a camel before going back home, but I was warned against it with my recent back incident. I guess I should have brought my camera with me to take pictures.

The light grey-pewtery waves of the Indian Ocean crashed mercilessly onto the beach -apparently the waters are too rogue for swimming even. The depth drops off very quickly and the currents are extremely dangerous. But what a site! Uncle S said it always humbles him, reminds him of God's power, greatness, majesty. It was very beautiful and very humbling -the expanse just stretches on to infinity and is awe-inspiring indeed. As they'd say here, Alhamdulillah!