Hello and welcome to Best Of Maclean’s.

I travelled to Pakistan to aid with the tragic floods. It was devastating. And inspiring.

Following a summer filled with the worst floods Pakistan has ever seen—which displaced more than 33 million people and killed at least 1,678—countless volunteers and aid workers visited the country to help with relief efforts. One of them was Mashaal Saeed, a Pakistani-Canadian who travelled to her home country with Islamic Relief Canada. She was devastated by the destruction she witnessed, and remains determined to help in any way she can. This is her story.

As we pulled into a town in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which was heavily affected by flooding, my brain could not process what I was seeing. We quickly went from driving on dusty, dirt roads in a scorched, dry area to being completely surrounded by water. There was so much water that I initially thought I was looking at a lake, but then I saw the roofs of drowned houses.

By the time we visited, the water had already receded significantly from where it had been just days prior, but it was still up to my shoulders (or even higher) in some areas. In many of the places we saw, the water remained at a standstill. Locals told me that this was one of the main differences between these floods and flooding in previous years. One man told me he’d lived through two other devastating floods in the country, but this was by far the worst because the water came in quickly and stayed for days or even weeks, whereas in the past it receded almost as quickly as it arrived. 

And it’s not just water...

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