Workers
from the Red Cross of Viet Nam (VNRC) have been performing heroics
this week as the country struggles to cope with the heaviest
floods to hit the country in living memory.
While the government’s decision to evacuate hundreds of
thousands of imperilled residents to higher ground certainly
saved countless lives, the VNRC are saving lives and bringing
hope on an hourly basis.
Travelling with Civil Defence, Search and Rescue teams and other
rescuers, the Red Cross workers have emptied their warehouses
of relief stocks and are travelling by boat, canoe and car to
reach the stricken. An estimated twenty million people have
been affected by floods since July, with thousands of homes
destroyed, dozens of lives lost, and rice crops ruined by the
inundations that followed Typhoon Lekima.
The International Federation today launches an appeal for 3.2
million Swiss francs to allow VNRC to get rice, household kits,
mosquito nets, water containers and blankets to almost 200,000
people in the seven most heavily-affected provinces. Already,
200,000 Swiss francs have been released from the Disaster Relief
Emergency Fund to allow immediate emergency aid to continue.
Vietnamese people, business, communities and ex-patriots have
rallied to give hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and
relief goods.
Doctors in local health centres warn that if immediate attention
is not paid to water and sanitation then diarrhoea and other
diseases could pose problems. Senior staff in two health centres
we visited on Wednesday reported a five-fold increase in demand
for their services in recent days. Many people we saw, including
very elderly citizens, had waded through waist-high water to
get basic medicines.
In lowland areas, floodwaters are receding slowly, but are still
six metres deep in places. We saw dozens of people camped on
top of flood dykes, a metre above filthy floodwater in Ninh
Binh province, near Hanoi.
“I helped to build this dam with my labour in 1960 and
now I am living on it,” said Dinh Thi Van, aged 69. “We
are sleeping with our pigs and buffalos under thin sheets of
plastic.”
Van added that ten members of her extended family are sleeping
in shifts in two beds inside a makeshift shelter crafted from
bamboo they grabbed from the floodwater, topped with tarpaulin
normally used for keeping rice dry. She wants nothing more than
to get back to her home – the previous night she claimed
she awoke with a snake crawling across her throat.
Close to the dyke, but still in his home, 61-year-old farmer
Dinh Tiung Nhat and his granddaughter, 13-year-old Bui Thi Hue
sit disconsolate in a boat by the house which now shelters 15
people. He tells us he lost his entire rice crop this year,
and has only enough to feed his family for one more month. More
seriously, his fresh water supplies will only last two more
days.
"Clean water is our biggest need. We are using as little
as we can, but we need purification tablets. We need fuel too
and equipment to cook," Nhat says.
On Sunday we took to small boat with three members of the Thanh
Hoa branch of the Red Cross – Chairman Hoang Tien Thien,
Doctor Vu Thank Khuong and Phom Van Khoi. The boat was loaded
with plastic bags full of bread, dried noodles, biscuits, aspirin
and antidiarrhoeal medicine. Animal carcasses and excrement,
along with rapidly breeding mosquitoes have made this area a
health hazard.
For the first few minutes we travel up what was the main road
to Dinh Cat village. We see people carrying their belongings,
neck deep in the murky water. Then our boat sails over the paddy-fields
five metres below us, what is now a huge new lake, with houses
half-hidden, treetops just visible.
We pass through the breached dam. A 200-metre gash has been
gouged out of the dyke, flooding hundreds of hectares. Suddenly
we hear shouts, and see dozens of people climbing onto roofs
of the village houses, swimming towards our boat, waving for
help.
Hoang holds out the Red Cross flag in front of the boat to identify
us. For the next hour, we visit house after house, sailing up
to second-storey windows, or rooftops, distributing the first
relief goods these people have seen since they became marooned
three days beforehand.
Forty-six-year-old Van Hung has been sleeping on the roof of
his house for four nights, along with his wife, two children,
and another family. “We still have food but we can't cook
it because we have no water or fuel,” he told us.
Minutes later, as we pass a food parcel to a young man, he slips
and disappears into the deepening water midstream. Phom reaches
down from our boat and helps him back to the surface. Heroes,
indeed.
As light fades, we see a dozen displaced people moving towards
the breach in the dam. They have been living totally marooned
for three days.
“Hurry,” calls Hoang, anxious to be off the water
before nightfall. “We can't hurry, we are too tired and
hungry,’ one woman calls out of the shadows.
The next day shows another side of the disaster. In Nge An province,
flash floods wreaked havoc, dashing dozens of houses into the
river. Sisters Phung Phi Van and Phung Phi Nga sit in a small
temporary hut, several wardrobes pushed together and covered
with plastic sheeting.
Their mother-in-law Tian Thi Tho is looking after the older
children and helping with cooking as her house escaped the floods.
Back on the dam in Ninh Binh, residents are facing another night
under the stars. People’s Committee chairman for the region
Truong Cong Hoa estimates that it may be another month or more
before they can get back home.
That’s too long to contemplate for 28-year-old Nguyen
Thi Ninh and her husband Nguyen Van Xuan, 36-years-old. They’ve
been living on dried noodles for three days, and using the filthy
floodwater to cook. Their only possessions seem to be a few
pots, some of which they fished out of the water.
“We need so many things, I can’t even begin to figure
it all out”, she says.
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