Nooshin Erfani, in Kavongo Namibia
“This is a bad flood,” said 85-year old Helvy, “I don’t remember seeing anything like this before”.
Helvy is from Sikondo village, just outside Rundu in the Kavango region of Namibia. But for the last ten days she has been living in a relocation camp, where almost 600 hundred people have fled after the nearby Kavango River burst its banks.
“At first we were not too worried, but then it rained non-stop for two days. Our cattle kraal (enclosure) filled with water and then my house did too. Then my son, the headman,” she said, pointing to a white-haired man standing nearby, “told me we had to quickly leave our home because it was not safe. I was scared.”
Helvy, and the other residents of the relocation camp, now live in government-issued tents, sometimes five or six families per tent. They have access to drinking water through two taps the Namibian Red Cross has installed, which are connected to portable water tanks supplied by the government.
The Red Cross provincial office has been giving support to the camp, supplying water-purification tablets, jerry cans and mosquito nets, as well as providing first aid services and building pit latrines on its outskirts. Red Cross volunteers, most of them from the affected community itself, have also helped set up resident committees to deal with security and health issues within the camp.
Six regions in Namibia have had flooding this year, causing 92 deaths, displacing 13,000 and affecting more than 356,000 people, since the torrential rains started in February. The Namibian President declared a state of emergency on 17 March 2009, saying the floods were the worst in recent memory.
About two hour’s drive from Helvy’s camp, Maria and her 11 children are living in a tent and two make-shift shelters about 600 meters from where the banks of the Kavango River used to be. Now it edges at Maria’s feet as she points into the middle-distance, at a trio of huts almost submerged by water.
“Those are our huts,” she says. “We woke up in the middle of the night and found the water rising up. I was crying and trying to save what I could. But we lost our clothes, school books, almost everything. I don’t know what’s going to happen to us.”