“You won’t recognise Bumburet Valley when we get there,” the jeep driver informed me as we navigated through streams and attempted to drive over broken roads that were washed away by devastating floods that hit Chitral District in July and August this year.

One needs a 4x4 vehicle for the two-hour drive from Chitral town to the Kalash Valleys, which borders the Afghan province of Nuristan. It’s not a journey one can take lightly, and in fact we were only able to go there thanks to a grant given by the Earth Journalism Network.

The three Kalash valleys of Bumburet, Rumbur and Birir are encircled by high mountains, separating them from Nuristan whose people were converted to Islam in the 19th century by an Afghan king.

The Kalasha are an ancient tribe, the last survivors of Kafiristan (of which Nuristan was once a part), and their pre-Islamic religion is focused on their environment. Although they worship a creator called “Desau”, they also believe that trees, stones and streams all have souls.

The Kalash valley of Bumburet struggles to survive post floods

A narrow jeep track used to lead into the narrow valley of Bumburet (the largest of the three valleys) but it is now strewn with large boulders brought down by the floods. To get to the villages of Bumburet, you now have to cut through agricultural fields and crisscross the main nullah. The track was opened just a month after floods that caused widespread destruction throughout Chitral District.

At the entrance to Bumburet Valley lies the flood-damaged government primary school, where the children now have to study in tents alongside the jeep track. The nearby Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation Motel, which had individual wooden chalets and a large garden surrounded by a gushing water channel is now in ruins. The water channel became a raging stream as floodwater came rushing down the mountains and into the Bumburet valley.

The rest of the main town in the valley was also badly hit; all the big hotels (Bumburet was a popular tourist destination before the floods) were damaged or destroyed as were countless shops, around two dozen houses, many orchards, fields and, of course, the main road itself.

“I would say the floods were a result of all the deforestation that has taken place in these valleys in recent years, just look at the bare mountain sides — and, of course,climate change is also responsible. In the earlier years, summer would end in August when we would celebrate our autumn festival, it is still warm at the end of September,” explains Akram Hussain, a Kalash man who is in charge of the Kalasha Cultural Centre built by the Greek government in 2004 which is thankfully still intact.

The Centre houses an impressive museum, community centre and educational facilities for the Kalash people. The museum hosts a large collection of Kalasha antiques like old jewellery, cooking utensils, sculptures of horses, rugs and costumes. The Kalasha women still wear their traditional dress of embroidered black frock tied at the waist by a belt or sash.

The Centre was spared by the floods because of the strong stone walls built around the building by ‘Greek Volunteers’. “The high walls withstood the floodwaters that came rushing down from the mountains at one end of the valley and went around the building,” says Hussain.

The Greek government, which is presently facing severe economic problems at home cannot give the Kalasha much aid, believes that the Kalasha are descendants of Alexander the Great’s army which marched through the Hindu Kush Mountains centuries ago. Indeed, last year a team of geneticists led by the Oxford University sampled genomes from around the world and found that the Kalash people of Pakistan have chunks of DNA from an ancient European population.

Today only 4,114 Kalasha remain according to a census conducted in July 2014; there have been many conversions to Islam as more outsiders settle into the Kalash Valleys, often building homes near the main road. Around 1,800 Kalasha live in Bumburet but higher up on the sides of the valley.

“Our culture was already under threat, and now these floods have destroyed our crops and orchards. We will have to buy food from the bazaar and store it if we are to survive this winter. Luckily, there was no loss of lives in Bumburet because we got a call from the border police which jointly patrols the border with the army. They called us over our mobile phones to warn us that the flood was coming,” says Hussain.

“I called people living near the Bumburet nullah (the mountain stream that runs through the valley floor) and told them to get out.”

According to him, there were two major floods in Bumburet in July and a smaller one in August: “The second flood in July which lasted for two days caused the most damage. We have never seen floods like this in the Kalash valleys before. I would say that at least half of Bumburet Valley was destroyed or damaged by these floods.”

Out of the 22 houses destroyed or damaged in the recent floods, four belonged to Kalash families.

“Our houses are mostly built higher up and all the people living below ran up to our homes,” explains Shaheen Gul, a young Kalash woman living in Krakal Village in Bumburet. “But our fields with corn and beans that were ready for harvest and fruit trees like walnuts and apricots are gone as they were near the nullah.”

Krakal Village is one of the oldest settlements in Bumburet, built high above the main road. The Kalasha’s traditional homes are extremely tough and well built and the wooden houses are almost stacked upon one another. “We could hear the flood before it arrived — we were so scared by the roaring sound in the middle of the night. Then the earth started shaking as if there was an earthquake. It was raining very hard that night,” she recalls. “Later, when we came down, we saw all the destruction — these floods were definitely much worse compared to the 2010 floods.”

The soldiers patrolling the border with Afghanistan say that melting glaciers also played a role in the current floods.

“There are around four glaciers high up in these mountains overlooking Bumburet; glacial floods came down along with the rain water that is why there were so many large boulders and we even saw large chunks of black ice,” explains Shair Shah, a member of the Chitral Levies border force.

Syed Harir Shah, an expert in disaster risk reduction who comes from Chitral, feels that torrential rainfall was the main cause of the flooding, “The shifting of the monsoon further extreme west to Chitral is a highly unusual event. It needs to be researched. How did it shift? Why was no proper warning given to the people of Chitral?”

What will happen next year if the heavy rains come again is the daunting question in everyone’s mind.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, October 4th, 2015

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