Patrick Nicholson: The cans and buckets are empty and people are desperate

I have recently returned from Angola where I witnessed haunting scenes of poverty but I never expected to see the same levels of misery in Iraq, a country floating on oil.

I visited Umm Qasr as part of a Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (Cafod) emergency response team, and had been led to believe it was a town under control, where the needs of the people were being met.

The town is not under control. It's like the Wild West, and even the most serious humanitarian concern, water, is not being adequately administered.

Everywhere I went in Umm Qasr, people asked me for water. Wherever you look, people are carting around buckets and drums.

While tankers are being sent into the city by the Allied forces, people in the town told me that the water was being sold by the Iraqi drivers at 250 dinars for 20 litres – the average Iraqi earns 8,000 dinars a month. The standard humanitarian quota for water in emergency situations is a minimum of 20 litres per person each day.

One mother of 14, Umm Sami, listed her day-to-day problems as "first problem, water, second problem water, third problem water". Next to her two-room house was an oil drum containing dirty, stagnant liquid, which was the only water store for her entire family. She told me that she was embarrassed not to be able to offer us a drink and also for having a dirty face.

Many, like Umm Sami, are still collecting the majority of their water from the wells, throwing tin cans tied to lengths of string down the 15-metre holes and drawing out dirty water.

It is hard to assess whether enough water is entering Umm Qasr but even if sufficient amounts are coming in to meet the needs of the town's 40,000 population many more people are coming in from neighbouring areas, including Basra.

Thoria Hingibeba, a matron at the local hospital, told me that it had not received any water for three days. Although tankers had initially delivered water to the hospital, that supply had now stopped, she claimed. She was seeing many people with illnesses caused by dirty water. The generator had broken and morale was rock bottom as medical workers grew increasingly tired and frustrated. The hospital had been swamped by 400 people that day – nearly three times the usual flow – after a false rumour had circulated that new supplies of medicines had been delivered. Many had come, they said, because American radio broadcasts told them they would be looked after.

Abud Alhall Sultan was one of the people. He had brought his five-year-old daughter, Fatima, who was very ill, from Basra. He told me he thought she had only days to live and that Umm Qasr was his last chance to save her. The position in Basra, he said, was very grim, with many bombings and killings. The only water available was that from the river provided by the government.

There is a lot of anger toward Westerners in Umm Qasr, triggered by bitter disappointment at their "liberation". They feel they have been given false expectations and are scared by the breakdown in social order in the town. I saw no obvious Allied presence and the normal structures of schools, government and police has disappeared. But the people are hopeful for a future without Saddam Hussein. However bad the situation today, they told me, it was better than under Saddam's regime.

Patrick Nicholson is a communicator with Cafod's Emergency Response Support Team