I took this photo at a drought relief project in Nushki, close to the border with Afghanistan. The people from the camp were Afghanistan refugees. Three years without any significant rainfall had diminished their livestock and left them dependent on outside support.

I was unaware before I arrived in Nushki that I was travelling with a rain goddess but this was the third time that this had happened to the writer I was with. Shortly after our arrival the sky began to darken and eventually in the late afternoon the rain started. A night's rain may not even begin to make a dent into a serious water shortage but it had quite an impact on the landscape. The desert appeared to be covered in milk. The earth was so hard from months of no rain that the water could not penetrate and the rain sat on the surface making travelling very difficult. Our jeep at one point balanced on the edge of a huge hole that was invisible under the milky lake.

On this first visit before the rains began, we had spent several hours in the camp. The men were heavy in discussion with the Oxfam team as were the women heads of households. The boys were all very visible, some of them playing in and around the camp but I couldn't see many girls. As I wandered around, I found and photographed several young girls, working together or helping their mothers with domestic chores, preparing the fire for cooking, making and baking bread and helping with the few animals that were about.

When it was time for us to leave I looked over to see some of the boys playing on the sand dunes above the camp, sliding down and then racing back up to the top again. I went running over and up the sand dune to get a photo of them playing. The girls, having finished their chores, all came rushing over to join in. Life in a camp isn't always easy but it's always great when you see children enjoying their surroundings.

On another Oxfam trip a year or so before this I'd been in a Peruvian camp rather inappropriately named the promised land. The inhabitants had lost their homes in floods caused by 'el Nino'. As I watched some young boys surfing down the sand dunes one of the camp leaders told me that they were all practicing as they hoped that sand surfing would become an international sport and that they felt that something good could come out of the El Nino disaster as their relocation would allow them a perfect chance to perfect the art of sand surfing.