Our man in Pakistan...
Adam Hewitt • Published 4 Nov 2010 09:30
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John Barrett, from Goring, who is leading the UK's flood crisis team in Pakistan
An aerial photo taken by Mr Barrett's team showing the scale of the floods
Another photo by the team
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FLOOD relief efforts in crisis-struck Pakistan are being co-ordinated by a man from Goring with decades of experience in disaster zones.
John Barrett, 57, described the scale of the devastation as “unimaginable” but he and his UK Government team are doing everything they can to restore people’s livelihoods and get children back into education, after 10,000 schools were washed away.
Speaking exclusively to The Chronicle yesterday (Wednesday) from the Pakistani capital Islamabad, he said: “It’s a massive challenge - there’s a huge risk of malaria and my greatest fear is tens or hundreds of thousands dying in a silent emergency - disease.”
He and his team of 15 are co-ordinating the Department for International Development’s (DfID) £134m contribution to the relief effort. The British public has given a further £63m through the Disasters Emergency Committee to help the 20 million people affected.
The 10 years’ worth of rain in three or four days completely overwhelmed the country’s flood defences, mainly built by British engineers pre-independence.
Mr Barrett said: “The challenge in crises of this scale is making sure we’re all pulling together and there’s a co-ordinated response.
“Many of the worst-affected people were in rural areas along the Indus river and we need to get them off dependence on handouts.
“The second emphasis is rebuilding the education infrastructure. Schools have been devastated, we need to get children back into a safe place.”
He said: "We have terms in Punjab and Sindh provinces now who are doing day-to-day fieldwork and a team in Islamabad doing the overall co-ordination."
He described the initial rescue work done by more than 60 batallions of Pakistan Army toops, who rescued more than 900,000 people from trees and rooftops.
He said: "Much of the water has now largely receded but elsewhere areas are still underwater."
He said the chaos caused by the floods was like a "land tsunami".
Mr Barrett has worked in overseas development since 1978, mostly in Africa but also in Asia. He headed up the DfID team in Zimbabwe for four years, during the food crisis and President Robert Mugabe’s destruction of hundreds of thousands of homes. He is likely to be in Pakistan for at least a year.
He did a Masters and PhD at Reading University and his overseas work has proved an inspiration to his children, with daughter Katie now working on a malaria project in Zambia, and son Alex, a former Oratory schoolboy, working on a game reserve in South Africa.
His other son, Daniel, is at university in Aberdeen and John’s wife, Wynne, lives at the family home in Goring.
For more information on the work the UK Government is doing in Pakistan, visit: www.dfid.gov.uk/Where-we-work/Asia-South/Pakistan
Or to donate visit: www.dec.org.uk
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