Mudslide survivors living back in danger zone
FREETOWN: Four months after the landslides that killed her husband and more than a thousand others, Mariama Kamara has returned to the mountainside that collapsed onto their home to live in an unfinished building. Kamara is one of hundreds of Sierra Leoneans recently kicked out of three government camps set up in the wake of the August 14 disaster, when heavy rains caused the partial disintegration of Sugar Loaf mountain, now a red rock scar looming over the country’s capital.
That day, heavy rains lashed the slopes left bare by chronic deforestation in Freetown, and huge boulders suddenly detached, rolling onto informal settlements, crushing shacks and
enveloping entire households in the Regent district in red mud. “We are back again at Regent, trying to pick up what is left after the disaster,” Kamara told AFP, breastfeeding her eight-month-old son while sitting on a cinder block. Handed $280 (235 euros) by the British government and the World Food Program to start a new life as a widow with three young children, the 27-year-old felt she had little choice but to return to the danger zone she had fled. “I sold some of the handouts to pay transport fare for my two children to go to my mother, until I find a suitable place,” she explained, describing how she ended up living in one of four unrecognized settlements in the Regent area. There are fears another landslide could strike Regent when the next rainy season rolls around.
The school with no roof Despite the lack of sanitation and shelter, a school still operates in the ruined mountain district, with around 300 children learning to read and write in a building with no roof, doors or windows. Many of the students were orphaned in August. Francis Abu Sankoh, a community leader, said the government had told him everyone eking out a precarious living had to get out by mid-November, but he refused to co-operate. “We will not force these people to leave while they still have nowhere else to stay,” he told AFP, saying he knew of nearly 200 households living in halffinished structures in Regent.
Relief workers are meanwhile exhausted after four months filling in for a government that is too under-resourced to carry out basic disaster management, with the Red Cross handing out its own payments of $300 to 1,000 people in late December. “We have played our part to respond to the emergency, and it is time to release the affected victims,” said Father George Crisafulli, Country Director for Don Bosco Fambul, an orphanage turned halfway house for homeless Sierra Leoneans. “It is the responsibility of government to provide financial support and housing for them,” Crisafulli added, as he prepared for the imminent departure of around 100 pregnant women and new mothers.
He noted that the government had promised to give financial assistance to child victims via a mobile money wallet, but they were yet to receive anything.