When the Ravi River spilled its banks and turned neighborhoods into brown, endless lakes, mothers carried children through the water and fathers clutched plastic bags of documents above their heads. In the rush, whole lives were left on drowned streets—wedding trunks, school certificates, framed photographs. What followed was a scramble to survive. But for thousands of women now crammed into government-run relief camps, survival has come with a second, quieter fight—for privacy, for cleanliness, for dignity.
“I brought medicine for my son today, but his condition is not getting better,” says Tayyaba Farooq, rocking her one-and-a-half-year-old on a thin mattress laid on concrete. “Our houses have drowned. We could only grab a pair of clothes before leaving. Now, we are left with nothing,” she said.
Like thousands of others, Tayyaba’s family fled when the Ravi’s embankment broke, submerging entire blocks in minutes. In Theme Park Society alone, an estimated 15,000 people were displaced. Across Punjab, the scale is staggering: according to provincial authorities, 3,243 villages have been devastated and more than 2.4 million people uprooted. Nearly 999,086 have been evacuated, and 395 relief camps now shelter 14,393 people. Medical teams are trying to hold the line—392 medical camps and 336 veterinary camps—but the numbers cannot capture what it means to be a woman in these spaces.
The Silent Emergency
In the camps, water is everywhere and nowhere at once—floodwater outside, scarcity inside. For women, that scarcity cuts along intimate lines.
“I am on my period and there is no water facility,” Tayyaba says plainly. “Other women and I are tearing spare clothing items to manage because we do not have sanitary pads. Women are getting infections, and because of that, their children also get infected.”
Shaheen, another evacuee, lowers her voice even as hundreds sleep shoulder to shoulder around her. “Menstruation is a taboo topic here. Nobody has provided us with sanitary pads or even soap. Children have been wearing the same clothes for four days.” She looks down at her daughter’s shirt, stained with dust and the chalky residue of hard water.
These are not mere inconveniences. Without clean water, soap, and menstrual supplies, women are forced into unsafe practices that heighten the risk of urinary tract infections, reproductive tract infections, and skin conditions—health crises that can spiral quickly in crowded spaces. When a mother falls ill in a camp, the illness does not stop at her body; it ripples through her child’s care, her family’s stability, the camp’s fragile order.
No Doors, No Curtains
Privacy is an early casualty of disaster. In many camps, close to a hundred people share a hall—men, women, children, the elderly—separated only by the will to look away.
Rabia, 20, is due to deliver in days. “I fear my child might get affected because we are living on the floor with just thin mattresses,” she says, tears tracing the dust on her cheeks. “There are no blankets, and I am constantly worried about infections.”
Saniya, six months pregnant, presses her palm to her back. “I have severe back pain, but I have to sleep on the mattress on the ground. I get headaches and pain all the time.” Her husband sits a few feet away, staring at a wall, helpless in the face of problems he cannot fix with his hands.
At night, the cold rises off the floor and sinks into bones. An elderly woman from Jammu Ghati, managing thyroid disease, speaks in short sentences, resting between them. “I feel cold at night, and my back hurts because I sleep on the floor without a blanket. I have grandchildren to care for. My husband died years ago. We are getting food, but we need mattresses and blankets.”
In humanitarian crises, the essentials are always defined first as calories and shelter. But for women, essentials also mean a lock on a door, a curtain around a washing area, a clean pad, and a bar of soap. Without those, the line between coping and breaking can be perilously thin.
Relief on Paper, Shortages on the Ground
No one denies that the state machinery is moving. Meals are being served; vaccination teams circulate; lists are drawn and redrawn as new families arrive. Some women, like Shehnaz, acknowledge the effort. “Some women have been given sanitary pads, but those are not enough for everyone in the camp,” she says. The unevenness is as predictable as the monsoon: what exists is not enough, and what is needed is not yet routine.
There is a difference between help and dignity. Food staves off hunger; dignity allows a person to lift their face while they eat. The women in these halls are asking for little that is extraordinary: reliable access to clean water; soap; sanitary pads; private, well-lit washing spaces; safe toilets; mattresses and blankets—the bare minimum that transforms survival into humane living.
Mothers as First Responders
Listen long enough in any camp, and you’ll hear a pattern: mothers are the first responders. They ration ORS sachets and paracetamol. They rotate children’s clothes on ropes strung from pillar to pillar. They rewash old cloth to reuse as pads, knowing it may harm them but unable to contemplate doing nothing. They navigate the shame imposed by taboo and the judgment that follows any request for privacy.
And still, they make space for hope. They hold babies upright after feeds to prevent coughs from deepening. They cool fevers with damp cloths. They tell older children stories of schools reopening, of a new beginning, even as the only books in sight are damp and curling at the edges.
What Dignity Looks Like
A handwashing station that never runs dry. A distribution point where a woman can ask for pads without whispering. A separate, lockable area for women and girls to bathe and change. A midwife who makes her rounds and knows the names of the women about to deliver. A health worker who can treat an infection before it becomes a fever that lays a mother low and endangers a child. A volunteer who arrives not with cameras, but with soap and underwear in multiple sizes. A blanket. A mattress. A door that closes.
These are small interventions with outsized impact. They do not require rebuilding a city; they require remembering that half the camp is female.
The Unheard, Heard
“Nobody talks about these issues,” Shaheen says. “Menstruation, pregnancy, dignity—none of this matters to anyone when we are all just trying to survive.” She is right about the silence, but she is wrong about the listening. The women of Punjab are speaking—in fever charts and torn cloth, in aching backs and newborn kicks, in the careful way they hide their needs so their children can eat first.
The floods have taken homes and harvests. They must not take dignity, too. If response is the test of a society, then this is the question before us now: Will we measure relief only in sacks of flour and tents, or also in the private, everyday mercies that allow a woman to remain whole while the waters recede?
Tayyaba’s son stirs, a small, hot weight in her arms. She hums to him, the melody barely louder than the fans that turn somewhere above, pushing warm air round and round the hall. Outside, the river’s surface glints, indifferent. Inside, a mother waits for the fever to break—and for the world to remember the other battles she fights, the ones no one sees.