Even though the water that submerged Aqilpur and the surrounding fields has since receded a little, after peaking a week ago, the brick kilns remain surrounded by water.
Most of the workers, paid starvation wages by the day, have left their homes to seek refuge further away on higher, dry land.
“I come here every day by bicycle and I go from one brickyard to another to look for work, but I can’t find anything,” Muhammad Ayub, an itinerant worker, told AFP.
A road that crosses the village has become the meeting place for brick workers, now deprived of homes and jobs.
Muhammad, 40, has his sick mother and an eight-year-old daughter to care for.
When his house was destroyed by the heavy rains that preceded the floods, he sent them to a relative living not far from the village.
But when the floods came, the family was forced to take refuge in a hastily created makeshift camp on a small rise outside the village.
More than 33 million people have been affected by the floods, caused by heavy monsoon rains. A third of Pakistan was found under water and at least 1,300 people perished.
The floods destroyed or seriously damaged nearly two million homes and businesses. And for the reconstruction, the cost of which has been estimated at more than 10 billion dollars by the government, the brickyards of Aqilpur will have to turn full again.
Thousands of small brick-making factories and artisanal brick kilns are scattered all over southern Pakistan. They are responsible for providing this essential building material to this country of 220 million inhabitants.
But for now, the mounds of bricks that are set to head for construction sites across the country continue to lie half-submerged.
Muhammad worked 12 hour nights making the bricks, earning less than 600 rupees ($3) a day for his labor.
Then in the morning, he went to work in the surrounding fields and only had time to sleep briefly in the afternoon, before returning to the brickyards.
Since these have been closed and the fields have been flooded, he has lost all his sources of income.
“Where to go when you are a manual worker?” he asks AFP. “Wherever workers go to look for work, they return empty-handed.”
Day laborers are among the poorest members of Pakistani society. In rural areas, many are operated by large landowners and brick kiln bosses, who keep them almost in a state of servitude.
– Child labor –
The brick manufacturing sector is particularly known for using child labor, which is prohibited by Pakistani law.
One of the youngest of the fifty or so brickmakers camping near Aqilpur is Muhammad Ismail. He started working with his father in a brickyard almost a year ago, after his 12th birthday.
He helped mold the mud bricks before they were baked in the ovens, hoping his work would help his parents feed his six younger siblings.
After they too had to flee their home due to flooding, he and his father had to borrow money to buy flour and other staples for the family.
“But now we are in debt,” says Muhammad. “I look for work with my father every day. We have to pay off our debt, but I’m losing hope.”
It is not uncommon in parts of Pakistan, when one is unable to repay a debt, to find oneself enslaved for years, the interest on the original sum continuing to increase.
Sometimes the repayment of this debt is passed down from one generation to the next.
Workers in Aqilpur asked a brick kiln owner to restart the stoves so that they could start working again. But Muhammad Ayub thinks they are asking the impossible.
“The water accumulated here is not going to dry up for at least three months,” he says. “And once there is no more water, it will take another two months or two and a half months for repairs.”
