Perspectives

I woke up Friday morning around 6am sick with a cold. I had slept horribly. I didn’t feel like going to work at all, but I got up and went at 7:30. My Malawian coworker (translator) was once again late! He showed up around 9am and said “sorry Gen, my house got flooded last night, so I had to move my stuff to a different place over night and this morning”. I felt so bad for him, if my place in Canada would have been flooded, I would not have gone to work the next morning. But he did, because he knew this was important for me. I was glad to see him and know that he was ok. Even if he was tired, he was still enthusiastic and positive so he said: “Let us move now”.

Then we left to go in the field. As we were riding, I realised that most of the villages we were passing by, got flooded the night before. The water was up to half the height of most houses. The crops of maize, rice, cassava and all their gardens were submersed by muddy water. All of a sudden, by cold, by bad night of sleep and my complaining about it, made me feel selfish. Seen in a different perspective, with another lens, my problem was not really a significant one. These people whose houses were mostly ruined by the water, had lost all of their flour, grains and seeds. They were washing their clothes by the side of the road and drying them on the ground. They were sitting on the street, meters from their houses hoping the water would dry so that they can go back. In some cases, their house are ruined. The houses in these villages are built out of weak mud bricks and even weaker mud cement. That’s it. So I’ll let you imagine what happens when the rain comes and washes away the mud cement holding the house together… It was a very sad morning and I was somehow troubled and I spend the entire day reflecting about the challenges of the villagers, their poverty and willingness to pay for things (like waterpoint repairs!). I once again was facing the difference in the challenges to overcome here in Malawi.

The soil gets really dry during the day as it is hot, so when it starts pouring rain at night, the top part of the soil gets saturated really fast and no water can get in. It creates a flash-flood and water eventually either infiltrates slowly or runoffs to the flood plain. The soil found in Karonga is a fine sand to sandy silt, so the drainage is poor. Some people decide to build their houses and plant their crops on the flood plain as it as it is richer in nutrients and better for farming. Plus people need to live somewhere so they often settle where ever there is land available. Most of them are not well educated and don’t understand the impact of living on a flood plain and there is no one to tell them the risk of doing so. It rains a lot here during the rainy season (hence the name!), sometimes for many hours, sometimes with violent intensity. They don’t get flooding like this one every time or every year, so people forget about the risks. This is a well know fact, it does not only happens in Malawi. People forget the risk of their surroundings: they build houses on the beach, at the top of a cliff, on or near a volcano, too close from a river with digs or too close from a nuclear power plant! Studies are done by statisticians about security perimeter that should be established in risky places to keep people safe and out of trouble, and also to keep insurance companies from paying if something happen within the set perimeter. Perimeter inside of which, people should not build houses or buildings. In most cases I’ve seen, the perimeter is established by the 100 (or 10 depending on the risk and situation) year cycle recurrence event that will lead to a catastrophe. By the way I’m far from being a statistician, so don’t quote me on this, as I’m not sure how these studies are made. In the case of a flood plain in Malawi, there is no need for a statistical analysis to know that this will happen again in a few years from now. People are people, they tend to forget the risks or are willing to live with them, it’s a gamble game.

Most people don’t have insurances here to cover their things, so when something happens, like a flood, an earthquake, etc., they lose everything. They rely on their community to work together, roll their sleeves and start all over again. Anyway, some villages had to be abandoned that day, most were ok at the end of the day, but hundreds of families lost their food reserve for the year to come. This will be hard on them. They can rebuild their houses, but not replace the flour and crops they lost. This is reality, this is how things work here, this is Africa!