Harrowing footage from Pakistan on ABC radio and TV yesterday.  Sally Sara, surely the ABC’s finest foreign correspondent, spoke with a young family in the city of Sukkur which has been devastated by the floods.  I heard the radio report in the morning bulletin and was shattered, then I watched the TV report in the evening. A day topped and tailed with the sound of a mother chanting in terrible grief the name of her tiny daughter, dead from malnourishment and dehydration.

Benazir was just two years old when she died.  When Sally Sara first met the family two weeks ago, Benazir looked like a small baby, weighing only five kilograms. She was the second child from the family to die.  Just before Benazir’s death, her three-month-old brother, Wazir, had also died.  And now the family is fearful their other daughter, Guddi, will die shortly.

The family has lost everything.  The father stands before the camera, straight and handsome, and says they are helpless. If anything has been spared from their home, he says,

… it would have been looted by now.

The mother shows a tattered red dress, all she has left of her daughter.  Soon, she will not even have her grave, for the family will return to their village and try to go on living.

The camera pulls away and there in the distance is the father squatting at Benazir’s grave.  He covers the grave with a small plank of wood lest the floods come that way too, but it will offer no bulwark.

To watch Sally Sara’s report, click here.

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The Guardian reports two major cultural sites are also in the path of the floods: the Bhutto family mausoleum in the town of Larkana, and Mohenjo-daro,

one of the largest settlements of the ancient Indus valley civilisation, a UNESCO world heritage site built around 2500BC.

The Bhutto mausoleum is on a grandiose scale, resembling the Taj Mahal,  and together with the town in which its located, is a place of “both political and religious pilgrimage.”

It contains the remains of Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated by Islamic extremists in 2007; her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s first elected prime minister, who was hanged by a military dictatorship in 1977;  and her two murdered brothers.

The flood water is heading in the direction of both of these sites.  Sorely in need of a miracle, the provincial irrigation minister is quoted as saying,

We’ll try everything possible to save these sites.

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To make a donation to the victims of the Pakistan floods, go to the Red Cross here, or your preferred aid agency.

Images: Pakistan flood, courtesy of ABC News (top); Mohenjo-daro, photographed by James Stanfield for National Geographic (bottom)