For flood-hit women, answering call of nature is a question

In the absence of sanitation facilities, Taijee Jogi and her two dozen female relatives have to wait till night to go to the sporadic bush patches near their colony for urination and defecation.
Until three months back, they could do this whenever they wanted. But after the recent monsoon rains inundated their almost entire area, they are left with no choice but to wait until it is dark so that everybody in the colony is asleep and there are no passers-by. “What else can we do? Despite the severe heat, most women also drink little water so that they do not feel the urge to use the ‘bathroom’,” says Taijee.
She lives in a small colony of traditional gypsies, Goth Lakhano Jogi, which comprises around a dozen dilapidated huts and now surrounded by water, appears as if it is a small island. The dwellers of this settlement lived in another village in Thatta district. But after their village was completely washed away during the floods of 2010, they moved to their current location at Jati Chowk, where a nongovernmental organisation (NGO) helped them build their huts.
But misery followed them there and this year’s rains flooded their new settlement. The NGO built huts for them, but did not construct a single toilet in the colony. So the women and children of the colony usually use the bushes near their colony. “We are thankful to the NGO, which helped us build our huts, but perhaps they think we gypsies do not use toilets, so they did not build one in the colony,” said Lakhano Jogi, the chieftain of the tribe.
Women of the Goth Allah Bachayo village in Jati taluka in Thatta district are also facing similar problems. Their village was completely submerged when rainwater caused breaches in the Karo Gongaro drain and they left their village to start living on the banks of the Shah Kapoor canal. Some international donors with the help of local NGOs provided them with tents, but there is no toilet in the tent village.
The surrounding areas are also submerged and the women of this village too have to wait until night to use the open space to answer the call of nature. Some male villagers have dug two large trenches behind the tents so that women can use them. But there are four pregnant women in the village and they find it hard to get down into the trenches and come up again.
“We usually wait until night. But if we are not in a position to wait anymore, we just use the roadside and if somebody arrives there, we just lower our head,” says Amina, a resident of the tent village. Healthcare experts say that holding back on urinating and defecating for a long time can harm kidneys and eventually result in renal failure.
Consultant gastroenterologist of the Department of Medicine the at Aga Khan University, Prof Dr Hasnain Ali Shah said by doing this, a person can suffer from severe constipation and there would be lot of pressure on kidneys too. According to the United Nation’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the recent torrential monsoon rains in southern Sindh have triggered serious flooding, affecting over five million people. Among them are communities, which are still recovering from last year’s extraordinary floods.
An official of the United Nations Children’s Fund, Samiullah, told Pakistan Today that they are going to build 9,000 toilets in the rain- and flood-hit areas, but they would be constructed at government’s relief camps only.