Field trip

The recent heavy rains had led to reports from some communities in the district of flooding causing signifcant damage to their homes and livestock. My organisation is one of the members of the local Disaster Emergency Team so one Sunday I was asked to join the team of around 15 officials (a mixture of council departments and NGOs like the Red Cross) to visit the communities, assess the damage and determine what support was needed. After much discussion about food and drink but also the need for raincoats and wellington boots (called gumboots out here) we jumped into two 4x4 vehicles and set off for a village called Manyonyo. The journey should have taken around an hour but the road worsened, got increasingly bumpy, muddy and flooded so we arrived sometime over three hours later. This included a couple of stops to push one of vehicles out after it had got stuck and led to most of us being sprayed with mud as we tried to get it moving. 

Manyonyo is a small farming community of probably 1,500 people consisting of settlements of 5 or more homes mainly made of mud. Whilst basic they are pretty self-sufficient with maize, sugar cane, sweet potatoes and ground nuts grown in the fields, and then animals like cattle, pigs, goats and chicken kept by the families. They seemed pleased to see us even though we arrived only to assess the damage rather than to provide any immediate relief. Through the chair of the community we explained our plan and then split up to teams of two, led by the locals, to basically count the number of homes and other buildings like toilets and chicken houses that had collapsed, people affected, livestock displaced and agricultural land affected. We left with promises of returning throughout the following week to make further assessments and to provide support. The vehicles managed to get stuck yet again as the dark surrounded us and it became difficult to spot the potholes.