‘Our hearts are broken, please help’
A 10-year-old girl’s family and her home vanished in a mudslide. She is one of many flood victims
The harrowing tale of a 10-year-old girl, left orphaned after her mother, father and baby brother were killed in a landslide, is but one of hundreds of heart-wrenching stories emerging from flood ravaged Kwazulu-natal this week.
“We huddled around her. We told her she is safe. We told her we will look after her.” This is how Durban resident Jason Norris described telling his dead neighbour’s daughter that her family had been wiped out in a landslide.
Little Shakirah Hajji is a quiet, shy girl. She sat wide-eyed and shocked by the trauma of losing her family.
Her neighbours awoke to a thunderous roar at about 4am on Tuesday 12 April after the first night of torrential rain hit the province.
Minutes before the landslide wiped out the Hajji home in Westville another neighbour, Lenard Hall, got up because his dogs were restless.
He opened the back door and looked towards the Hajji house on a slope facing the Palmiet River. Hall couldn’t see anything in the dark. Then he heard a “massive crash”.
“The sound was so loud I braced myself,” Hall said.
Hundreds of tonnes of soil obliterated the Hajji house, sweeping it down the slope and engulfing two other houses below. One house was empty, and the inhabitants of the other house found Shakirah unconscious in the garden at sunrise.
By then Norris, Hall and Hajji relatives were frantically wading through the mud looking for Shakirah’s mother, Halima, her father, Edward, and her infant brother, Kevin.
Later search and rescue teams joined them, but they couldn’t find anyone. The site was a deluge of mud, rubble and vegetation. They searched until 4pm.
“I thought they might have been washed into the river, but then we found the bodies underneath a tree in the swimming pool,” Norris said.
He and his wife were friends with Shakirah’s family. They took her in and together with neighbours Megan Sponneck and Mechell Chetty, have started a Back-a-buddy fundraising campaign for her.
A counsellor advised them on how to explain the tragedy to Shakirah.
Norris said family and friends formed a close circle around her and told her that her parents and brother were dead and they would take care of her.
Sponneck said: “At the site she was huddled in a blanket and she kept asking for her mom and dad. Now I think she’s numb. We have her in regular counselling because the bomb will drop. The trauma is masked by distractions like getting her clothes, school stuff and moving into a place with her uncle and aunt.”
Shakirah’s story is representative of how many Kwazulu-natal residents have rallied in response to the catastrophic floods that have laid waste to swathes of the province and claimed the lives of at least 448 people, including 57 children.
It threatens to severely disrupt education in the province.
The department of education says at least 630 schools have been affected; 101 are inaccessible and 124 have been extensively damaged.
Search and rescue operations are ongoing, with a team of 80 police, army and private specialists operating out of Durban’s Virginia Airport.
This week rescuers were still winching people off rooftops, dispatching divers to search for bodies and delivering emergency supplies to stranded people.
The scale of the disaster is yet to be quantified, but the Durban Chamber of Commerce says the cost to the city economy alone, besides infrastructure damage, is R730-million.
Kwazulu-natal Premier Sihle Zikalala put the infrastructural damage at R6.5-billion.
Authorities and aid workers are trying to avert an impending humanitarian crisis.
The floods destroyed water and electricity supply lines. Some ethekwini residents have been without water for eight days, prompting the chamber to warn of an “economic collapse” unless this is urgently addressed.
Charities and nongovernmental agencies are overwhelmed. Muhammed Sooliman, of Gift of the Givers, said his organisation had delivered 75 000 litres of bottled water, 3 500 food parcels and 4 000 blankets.
“We are updating our assessments all the time. I think we will distribute 12000 more food packs in the next week and a half. A pack is 35kg and consists of staples like porridge, rice and maize. It should feed a family of four for a month.
“But you are dealing with communities that were already poor and desperate before the floods.”
Sooliman said damaged infrastructure meant people couldn’t get to work. And what work there is, is in short supply because many factories have been flooded.
“The floods have highlighted the extent of poverty. For people living on the fringes of society, this tips them over and it will take a long time to get their lives back on track.”
He said many churches and charities were active, especially around ethekwini metro.
They were able to provide immediate relief, but the long-term rebuild would be demanding, especially in so far as housing and education are concerned.
“Many people are staying at school halls. We haven’t got to helping the schoolchildren yet. In the next few weeks, we will need textbooks and stationery and we will need to repair the damage to schools, many of which are already in a state of disrepair.”
Kwazulu-natal MPL Imran Keeka, the Democratic Party’s provincial spokesperson on education, said the floods would “compound an already dire situation” at public schools.
“We don’t know the full extent of the impact, but I was in touch with education MEC Kwazi Mshengu and he said it is ‘bad’.”
Keeka said there were about 2.7 million learners in the province at 5800 state schools. More than 600 schools were damaged by the floods.
“But that is on top of 189 schools that were damaged in the riots in July last year and about 100 schools vandalised in the December holidays. And then there are 80-odd schools that were damaged in the 2016 rains. Another 890 schools in the province still have pit latrines. It already takes the government so long to respond to all the existing challenges. Imagine flood damage on top of that,” he said.
“And we have a humanitarian problem on our hands because as an emergency measure some schools are occupied by people who were displaced by the floods. How long will it take to provide relief to them? In Durban people have been living in transit camps for 15 years.”
Sooliman said the practical difficulties associated with Kwazulu-natal’s rebuild were pressing but people were also “hugely traumatised”.
“You can see the strain on people’s faces. It is starting to take its toll. What people have experienced is unbelievable. It is horrific.”
Among the 57 children killed in the floods were two brothers who attended a school in Northdene.
A teacher at their school said the children were deeply affected by the deaths. “Trauma digs up memories, all other sorts of heartache and anxiety. In Kwazulu-natal people recently went through the looting and it affected the children. And now this.”
The tragedy will have a profound effect on the psyche of already distressed people. Caron Bustin, a Durban psychologist who works mostly with children, said the Covid19 pandemic, the July unrest and the floods were deeply disturbing.
“They are abnormal circumstances that created fear and anxiety. These are scary, especially for children. There will be long-term implications for children exposed to this insecure world. Anxiety must be most prevalent now. There are no socioeconomic barriers to the events that have occurred and people feel disempowered. But fear is one of our most primal reactions, it is part of our instinct for survival,” she said.
“I was at a school today where teachers said they were talking to children about the floods. It is important to acknowledge that we are allowed to be afraid. In talking about this and reflecting on our individual and collective experience we are more likely to get through this together.”
In an area called Madimeni, Samke Phewa and 50 of her neighbours sought refuge in a church after their houses were washed away last week.
This week Phewa will bury her three-year-old niece, Guhlegonke, who drowned. Phewa’s sister, Nelly Ndima, is presumed dead but her body has not been found.
“Our hearts are broken and we are left with nothing. We are desperate. If you can help, please help,” Phewa said.