Homeless left haunted, hopeless by floods
When Nozipho Sithole closes her eyes to sleep, she still hears the screams of her neighbour’s two young children as they were swept away by the floodwaters that killed hundreds of people in South Africa last month.
Like Sithole, many of those living in a community hall in Durban are haunted by what they saw and what they lost.
Muffled sobs echo through the shelter at night, she said.
“The night the floods started, the sand looked like it was boiling from the water, the whole house was moving,” said the 35 year old, who gave up her care job at an old-age home to look after flood survivors.
“The sand and the river swallowed up the little ones,” she said, cradling the baby of a fellow resident at the shelter in Durban’s Ntuzuma district.
The community centre has been home to about 300 people left homeless by the flooding in KwaZulu-Natal, which killed at least 430 people, displaced thousands and caused damage estimated at R10 billion.
Many are traumatised or grieving, others feel defeated and unable to start rebuilding their lives, said Nokuthula Shandu, a counsellor with medical charity Doctors Without Borders.
“Survivors are asking ‘working for what?’, what they earn won’t be enough to build a new house, they feel hopeless,” she said.
From California to India, extreme weather shocks linked to climate change – floods, drought and wildfires – will take an increasingly heavy toll on people’s mental health, experts say.
“They need to feel safe, they need to feel seen,” said Shandu.
In Ntuzuma, thin mattresses line the walls while young children wander barefoot, asking elders for pieces of toilet paper before heading to portable toilets lined up in the parking lot.
Informal settlements of shacks built from corrugated iron suffered the worst damage from the floods.
Many residents were unemployed, struggling to scrape by in one of the world’s most unequal countries. Three-quarters of the 340 people staying at the Ntuzuma shelter were jobless.
Others, who worked as domestic workers, bricklayers, gardeners and informal traders lost their identity documents in the floods, making it even harder for them to find work, said Sithole.
While the provincial governgovernment ment did not reply to requests for comment, it has estimated that more than 6 800 people have been left homeless by the floods and said work had begun on temporary accommodation for nearly 4 400 families.
But many shelter residents said they already felt forgotten.
“It’s like we don’t exist,” said Thandeka Ndlovu, 36. “They say time heals everything.
“Maybe one day we’ll be able to just see rain as rain.”
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