Alixandra Fazzina began her career as a war artist in Bosnia, and has worked throughout Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. She recently published a book, A Million Shillings, on migration from Somalia to Yemen. Currently based in Pakistan, she was caught up in the disaster when the country suddenly started to flood just over a month ago. A born photojournalist, she immediately started taking pictures. She tells BJP more about her epic ordeal and the work she was able to do.

"I’ve spent a lot of time in the Swat Valley over the last year, most recently working on a series of stories about women and children who have been kidnapped by the Taliban. I was heading back to Mingora [the largest city in the Swat Valley] on 28 July when the Swat River suddenly started to rise. It had been raining for 48 hours but it’s monsoon season and we didn’t anticipate anything unusual, but then I got a text message saying that one of the bridges further up the river had been washed away.

"My translator, driver and I were heading along the road by the side of the river at night, and we saw it suddenly rise up. We were soon in a foot of water so we took shelter in a petrol station; then it was one meter deep, and we saw someone being swept past us. That was very scary and we realised we were in a very dangerous situation, but we still had no idea of the scale of the problem [across the whole of Pakistan]. We managed to escape to higher ground and got to a bridge to try to cross the river, and found the army telling hundreds of other people trying to do the same thing that they needed to get off the bridge. An hour later the bridge collapsed and that night all 25 bridges across the Swat River were washed away.

"We were stranded on the other side, with no electricity, no fresh water, no landlines, no mobile reception, nothing, everything went down. Speaking to local villagers we quickly realised we were effectively on an island – nearly all of the roads were gone. We travelled along a cliff at the side of the river, and saw really extraordinary things. The petrol station where we had sheltered was almost completely submerged, we could only see the roof. The main road to Islamabad was under 10m of water. We saw a lot of people who had scrambled to rooftops, and a lot of people died. We were lucky to have survived.

"We ended up sheltering in a small museum, surrounded by Buddhist artefacts. It was really strange. But we didn’t have any food or water, so we decided that we had to try to get out. We set off on a long journey along valley roads to try to get north, but so many of the roads were washed away or blocked by cars and trees, we ended up doing a huge diversion through the mountains, travelling for four days and three nights. My translator and I had nothing but the clothes on our backs so we soon looked like refugees.

"We saw villages that had been heavily damaged by fighting [during Pakistan Army operations against the Taliban last year] and men carrying guns – it’s an area I would have tried to avoid before, and definitely not travelled through at night. But it’s funny, we felt relatively safe, much safer than we had been. At least you can run away if there’s gunfire; if a river suddenly rises there’s very little you can do. Eventually we managed to get onto an army helicopter that flew us the five minutes over the river to Mingora.

"When we finally moved south and on to Peshawar [which is about 100km south] we saw much worse devastation. A huge number of lives were lost in the Swat Valley because the water hurtled down, but as it came down from the mountains it spread out to become a sea, devastating the whole area. Millions of people were displaced. Sadly, many of the communities had already been affected by the displacement caused by fighting last year – we came across people who had been displaced three times in the last two years. This time they had been made homeless and there was no aid whatsoever, people were living on any piece of high ground they could find. They had no shelter, nothing, and it was still raining.

"I tried to photograph as much as I could over those first two weeks, although initially I didn’t have any way to recharge my batteries until we got to Peshawar. I went down to Islamabad twice to file pictures – once after we’d got out of Swat and again a week later – to contacts on national newspapers. I also did some work for UNHCR, Oxfam and WaterAid. All of them got in touch with me – there aren’t that many photographers working in Pakistan, and they knew me. I intend to keep working on the story to show its ongoing impact on peoples’ lives.

"Photographers working for the wires do very important work – my colleagues there are working very hard. But they have to drive back every day to file; I am able to stay for longer. They also have to keep in mind the image of the day and the front pages the next day, so they have to take a certain kind of picture. They need to include the water, so that people can locate the story, and tend to focus on pictures of people walking through the floods with children or possessions. I took those pictures too when the water first started rising, but now I’m able to go in more closely and find out peoples’ stories.

"This is an ongoing crisis – people who have become homeless are still homeless, and people are still being forced to leave their homes. But when the media says that 40m people have been affected, I don’t think you can grasp what that means. You need to say ‘OK, these are people, now let’s find out their names’."