In 2022, when the floodwaters swallowed entire districts of Sindh, I was on the ground in Jamshoro, organising humanitarian support and mobilising philanthropists to reach displaced families. What I witnessed there did not end when the water receded. It changed how I understand disaster response, and it continues to shape everything SINDHU Society does today.

The Suffering That Statistics Don’t Capture

Relief numbers, tents distributed, and food packages delivered are the figures that make it into reports. But in the camps, I saw a different kind of crisis unfolding quietly, one that rarely makes it into a donor dashboard.

Women and girls bore the brunt of this hidden suffering. Adolescent girls struggled to manage their menstrual health with no privacy and no supplies. Lactating mothers, already weakened by hunger and exhaustion, had no safe space to feed their infants. Washroom conditions were degrading in the truest sense of the word: pit latrines placed in open spaces, where a woman’s own shadow could expose her. I watched mothers hold up rillis and large chadars, standing guard for hours, just so their daughters could have a few minutes of privacy to relieve themselves.

This is not a detail. This is the daily reality that determines whether a displaced woman retains her dignity or loses it entirely.

When Girls Disappear from Their Own Homes

The lack of basic facilities and food pushed some girls to leave their homes altogether. A number of these cases ended with girls in shelter homes, later reunited with their families only through government intervention. These were not isolated incidents. They were formally reported across the affected districts, and they point to a protection failure that camp infrastructure alone cannot fix.

I also observed an alarming rise in early-age marriages, particularly among displaced families from areas like Shahdadkot and Dadu. When a household loses everything, a daughter’s marriage can become a survival strategy rather than a choice. This is one of the clearest signs that disaster response without gender protection safeguards can end up doing harm even as it delivers aid.

Violence Behind Closed Tent Flaps

Beyond the physical hardships, the mental toll on women was severe. I saw domestic violence increase, with husbands and mothers-in-law becoming more aggressive under the strain of displacement and loss. Disasters do not just destroy homes; they compound the pressures inside the family, and women absorb that pressure first.

The Hunger No One Talks About

There is a particular kind of pain I have never been able to unsee. Pregnant and lactating mothers, adolescent girls, and children between zero and five years old are the most nutritionally vulnerable people in any disaster, and they were the ones I found most neglected in the camps. For a nursing mother whose own body was already depleted by hunger and stress, there was often nothing extra to give her infant. For an adolescent girl going through her own growth years, there was no food designed for what her body needed.

In camp after camp, the only meal available to families was unwashed rice cooked in large communal degs, seasoned with nothing but raw spices in potato plao some time just boiled without washed rice no oil, no lentils, no vegetables. I watched small children, some barely old enough to sit up on their own, crying from hunger beside that rice because their bodies could not process it and their mothers had nothing else to offer them. That sound, a hungry infant crying while a pot of plain rice sits a few feet away, stays with a person forever.

SINDHU Society responded where we could: dry milk, diapers, and feeding bottles for infants, and moong dal khichdi and biscuits for young children who needed something their small bodies could actually digest. But alongside them were the sick and the elderly, equally invisible in the emergency response, who were desperate simply for clean drinking water and one home-cooked meal instead of the same rationed rice, day after day.

This is the part of disaster response that equity and the Sustainable Development Goals ask us to confront directly. When a flood or any disaster strikes, relief cannot be distributed as if every affected person has the same needs. A pregnant woman, a breastfeeding mother, a growing adolescent girl, an infant, a frail elderly person, a person living with illness, each carries a different threshold of vulnerability, and treating them identically in the name of speed or convenience is its own quiet injustice.

We do not do this work for applause or to be seen doing good. We do it because meeting people’s actual needs, not the needs that are easiest to package and photograph, is what humanity demands of us in that moment. A hungry child does not need our recognition. A malnourished mother does not need our praise. They need what their bodies require to survive, delivered on time, and delivered with dignity.

What This Experience Taught Me

These are not just stories of floodwaters. They are stories of dignity stripped away, of safety stolen, and of rights ignored. Until these issues are addressed alongside physical reconstruction, recovery will never be complete.

This conviction is why I founded SINDHU Society, Sustainable Initiatives for Nature Development and Human Utility, and why gender-responsive humanitarian action sits at the core of our work across Sindh. Anticipatory action, WASH facilities that account for menstrual health and privacy, child protection systems that catch girls before they disappear from the record, and safeguarding mechanisms that address domestic violence during displacement are not optional add-ons to disaster response. They are the response.

As Sindh braces for future flood seasons, including the vulnerable areas we are already coordinating around through anticipatory action planning, I carry this lesson with me: infrastructure can be rebuilt in months, but a girl’s safety, once lost, is far harder to restore. Our humanitarian response must be built to protect both from the very first day.

SINDHU Society works across gender equality, WASH, GBV prevention, climate resilience, and livelihoods in flood-affected districts of Sindh, Pakistan. To partner with us or support this work, connect with us at sindhu.org.pk.