An IOM team is today working with the Pakistan navy to deliver
1,000 shelter and non-food item relief kits to families stranded in
villages in the western Tando Bago area of Sindh's flood-stricken
Badin district.

The kits, each containing two plastic tarpaulins, two blankets,
a kitchen set and a bucket, will be the first international
assistance to reach the villages near Judho, many of which have
been cut off by flood waters since mid-August.

"About 30kms east of Tando Bago town the road gets narrower and
then disappears into a vast sea of water. The marines are ferrying
people to and from villages that have been cut off, but no
emergency shelter aid has reached them up to now," says IOM
Operations Officer Sher Sultan.

The operation, which follows IOM distributions of some 2,500
tents and shelter kits in Badin over the past month, will only meet
a fraction of local shelter needs, according to overwhelmed local
government officials. They believe that up to 1.7 million of the
district's 1.8 million residents have been affected by the floods
– the vast majority of them poor tenant farmers and their
families.

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In a government flood relief centre set up in a vocational
training college in Badin, 27-year-old tenant farmer Fida Hussain
says that in his village in Nindo Shaher Union Council, 35 kms from
Badin, all 200 houses are submerged in up to six feet of water
together with 600 acres land.

The cotton, rice, sugar cane, chili and tomato crops have all
been destroyed by the floods and he expects to have to stay in the
centre with 113 other families for two to three months before they
can safely return home.

At a second government relief centre at another technical
training college in Badin, 50-year-old small landowner Muhammad
Ghulam hopes that the 222 families from his community sheltering in
the centre will be able to start returning home "in a month or
so."

Their adjacent villages in Gharo and Golarchi Union Councils,
also 35km from Badin, are now submerged in up to five feet of flood
water and most of the metal frame and wooden houses that replaced
traditional mud huts have collapsed or "sank in the mud," together
with the school and the mosque, he says.

Their rice, cotton and tomato crop was lost, but 80 per cent of
their cows, water buffalos and sheep survived. Some of the men took
the livestock to dry ground to the east in Tharparkar district and
when the water subsides, they will return to the village, he
adds.

With nearly 90 per cent of Badin partially submerged by
floodwaters, displaced families sheltering in government relief
centres represent less of a humanitarian challenge to the
authorities and aid agencies than the thousands living in
spontaneous settlements set up on roads or higher, dry ground close
to their often inaccessible villages.

"Many families prefer to stay close to home rather than move
into relief centres or camps, even if they could reach them because
they don't want to mix with other communities. We have to respect
people's beliefs but it makes getting aid to them much more
difficult in terms of logistics," says IOM Hyderabad Head of Office
Arshad Rashid.

According to Pakistan's National Disaster Management Authority
(NDMA), over 8 million people have now been affected by the
flooding in all 23 districts in Sindh. Nearly 1.5 million houses
have been damaged or destroyed and over 716,000 individuals are now
living in 3,079 relief camps. The same number of displaced people
may be living in unrecorded, spontaneous settlements, according to
an IOM-led independent rapid needs assessment.

Based on available data and the assessment of 2,547 temporary
settlements completed nearly two weeks ago by IOM and partner
agencies in the IASC Emergency Shelter Custer, IOM is now appealing
to international donors for USD 14.6 million to procure and
distribute emergency shelter and non-food relief items to another
553,000 vulnerable people over the next three months.

"The money will go towards providing shelter and non-food relief
items for the most vulnerable flood victims, meeting the needs of
displaced people in temporary settlements and relief camps,
tracking displacement, building local capacity and coordinating the
work of the Emergency Shelter Cluster," says IOM Pakistan Chief of
Mission Hassan Abdel Moneim Mostafa.

For more information on the work of the Emergency Shelter
Cluster in the 2011 Pakistan floods please go to: "paragraph-link-no-underline" href="http://www.shelterpakistan.org"
target="_blank" title="">www.shelterpakistan.org.

For free use of pictures, copyright IOM, please go to:

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For other information please contact:

Chris Lom in Sindh

Tel: +92.303.555.2058

E-mail: "mailto:clom@iom.int">clom@iom.int

Saleem Rehmat in Islamabad

Tel: +92.300.856.0341

E-mail: "mailto:srehmat@iom.int">srehmat@iom.int