Melissa Harris-Perry: You're listening there to the sound of devastating floods that have wreaked havoc in Pakistan. Entire buildings, homes, roads, and bridges washed away.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres: Pakistan is awash in suffering. The Pakistani people are facing a monsoon on steroids, the relentless impact of epical levels of rain, and flooding.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That was UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres last week, talking about the worst floods that Pakistan has seen in over a decade. Also, last week, the country's climate minister said that one-third of the country was underwater, and officials have blamed climate change for this disaster. More than 1,300 people have died from the floods since mid-June. Nearly a third of them are children. By some estimates, more than 30 million people are displaced. For more on this, I'm joined by Susannah George, Washington Post Afghanistan and Pakistan bureau chief. Thanks for being with us, Susannah.

Susannah George: Thank you so much for having me on.

Melissa: Can you tell us where you've been reporting during the past few days and what you've seen?

Susannah: We've been going up and down Sindh province over the past few days. It's one of the worst hit provinces along with Baluchistan. It's more densely populated so there's a lot more human suffering here. We made it up to the furthest we could go along the highway yesterday before the floodwaters enveloped the road and then we went out on a boat for some people who were refusing to leave their homes. Other boats were rescuing people who were stranded at their homes, but the family that we stopped to speak to said that they didn't want to leave their livestock behind.

This is a rural province, people are incredibly poor and they said that these are the most valuable belongings they own and without them, they said that they saw no future for them, even if it meant them living on the roofs of their houses in this sea of water. They also said that they didn't trust the Pakistani government to take care of them once they reached dry land.

Melissa: It is hard for so many of us to even begin to imagine the idea that this family would see the alternative of living on dry land even in a displaced circumstance to be more troubling than staying in that flood.

Susannah: Well, they've heard stories from other people who have been moving back and forth between dry land to their homes in these flooded villages. Some of these villages have been flooded for over two weeks and so people are going back, they're renting a boat and going back to check on their homes to make sure that they're not looted. People who have stayed or have heard the horror stories of people who make it to dry land, only to find that there's no shelter, there's no humanitarian aid.

The government is providing two cooked meals a day if you're able to make it to a government camp, but there are very few camps compared to the amount of need and getting to those camps is very difficult. It means you often have to walk and these are large families often traveling with small children.

Melissa: Why are children so hard hit in this disaster?

Susannah: A lot of it has to do with the fact that children in this part of the country, I think I mentioned it earlier, this is a very poor part of the country. It's a rural part of the country. It's been hard hit by the economic crisis that Pakistan has been battling for years now. Lots of these children were malnourished before the floods hit and so once the floods hit, and then families had to leave everything behind and weren't able to flee with food, and then end up at these makeshift camps or are taking refuge in abandoned buildings and their kids don't have anything to eat.

They're not even-- the small amount of food that they had to eat when they were living on their farmland, that's why children are getting sicker than adults and dying in a lot larger numbers than adults.

Melissa: You made a point here about this flooding disaster coming into an existing disaster of malnourishment, of poverty, can you help us to understand what it means to talk about 30 million displaced persons in this kind of circumstance?

Susannah: These are people who have very little to begin with. They are not living with a safety net of some kind. They don't have savings to fall back on. They're living day-to-day. Most of the men who are the breadwinners in this province, in this conservative province, they work as day laborers, they're paid a daily wage. As soon as the flood hit, they were out of work and penniless because they were living day-to-day. When you have that pre-existing depth of poverty, and then a large natural disaster like this on top of it, it really puts families in a very difficult position.

I spoke about the family earlier who didn't want to leave their livestock behind and that kind of helps you understand why. This livestock, this is their investment, their house is pretty much gone. That's all they have in terms of something to fall back on. I asked them, "How long do you think you can live on this little bank?" It was a very narrow bank that they had been able to move their cattle on to where they had built some huts and were cooking, and they said, "If it comes down to it, we'll sell one of our goats or sell one of our water buffalo, or we'll start to sell the milk from our buffalo." That's how people here intend to survive while they wait for government assistance.

Melissa: For those who haven't experienced a flooding disaster of this kind, I think, it can be easy to imagine that the water that people are in or surrounded by is something like bath water, or swimming pool water or a lake, or something like that, but can you help us understand the conditions of the water and what other kinds of issues and illnesses that is likely to lead to in a medium and longer term?

Susannah: Water-borne illnesses, we've already seen a steep increase in those. Think about it, this water has been flowing down the length of the country. It's the villages that it is sitting in resting in now for, as I said, over two weeks in some of these villages. These are not villages with sewage systems. This water is mixed with sewage, a lot of it is stagnant, which is very dangerous for mosquitoes and the spread of malaria and dengue, which has recently become a problem in Pakistan.

This stagnant water and waterborne illness is one of the things that actually health care workers are most concerned about because there's so much water that has collected in this part of the country. Even if it were to naturally flow down to the sea, we're talking weeks, if not months, and that gives a lot of time for these diseases to erupt into a potential humanitarian crisis on the back of the crisis that Pakistan is currently battling.

Melissa: All right, Susannah, I just want to explain to our audience that while you and I were talking, there was an internet outage where you are in Pakistan, and we lost our connection to you on Zoom, so thanks so much for calling back on your cell. You talked with us about families waiting for assistance from the government, but can the government of Pakistan itself address a crisis of this size? Does it have the resources?

Susannah: Yes, there is a lot of anger and frustration among Pakistanis who've been affected by this crisis, but this is an enormous crisis. According to some satellite imagery, a third of the country is underwater, and 33 million people have been affected. This also comes at a time when Pakistan has been battling an economic crisis and so it really was larger crisis than any one country could have possibly responded to. There are some criticisms that the country did not respond quickly enough. These floods, especially when you look at the death toll numbers, that over 1,300 people killed, that is going back to June, which is when these floods began.

The government of Pakistan did not declare a natural disaster and start to dispatch aid using its military and navy, until just a few weeks ago. There are a lot of people who feel like they did not act quickly enough in order to make the job easier for themselves to respond to what was going to inevitably be a large humanitarian disaster.

Melissa: We're hearing officials connecting this to climate change. Is there evidence that this is in part or in whole a climate disaster?

Susannah: What we do know is that the Glacial lakes that lie in the North of Pakistan, because of larger than normal glacial melt over the summer months, those lakes began full. Normally those lakes would not be full at that time in the summer, and there would be some room for rainwater to fill them up. They began full, and because of that, the rain waters in the North had a more devastating impact as they made their way south, but it really was this large monsoon season with heavier than average rain in the Southern central part of the country that created this gigantic mass of water.

That's also connected slightly to the fact that we are in an El Nino season, which sees different weather patterns and so people were concerned about the months before August, which is when the Pakistani government really kicked into gear. There were some scientists who were ringing alarm bells, but it wasn't until all of these different factors came together and the enormity of the crisis was apparent that the government began to act

Melissa: Susannah, George is Washington Post Afghanistan and Pakistan bureau chief, and is reporting for us from Pakistan. Susanna, thank you so much for joining us.

Susannah: Thank you for having me.

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