A lot needs to be done...

over 2 years ago

I became a food victim today. It's sort of exaggerating in comparison to what typical flood victims go through, but I was a flood victim nonetheless. There was an overflow of the drainage around my estate and the majority of the houses that aren't exactly high or build with top floors got invaded by nasty stinky water from the roadside drainages.

For a while, I had been observing the drainage get full and I expected that the moment there was a little rain this would happen but I kinda hoped I wouldn't be home when it did. The moment it began to rain, I went back to bed and told everyone I wouldn't be going to school today. I already had the perfect rainy day planned in my head; Sleep, talk to men, eat, have a warm bath and work. But no, mother nature messed up my plan.

I couldn't get pictures of the event, but I did make a couple of videos so I just took a screenshot from the video. I'm usually very protective of my skin and these sorts of things but I had no choice but to get my feet into the water and save as many of the things I could save given the little time we had to raise beds, chairs, freezers and the likes before it got nasty. The freezer actually started floating out of the kitchen at some point.

Money lost and solutions

During the craziness to get the house in order to save our property, we never stopped to realize how much would be lost and what we would need to fix and change after that. My laptop was on the verge of falling inside the water when the freezer I kept it on began to float out of its position. I had no idea I could move that fast on water, I felt like Jesus.

After everything settled down, the water receded faster than it took it to get there and we cleaned up the place, we realized the generator had drunk up a puddle of water and it couldn't come on and the freezer was also close to useless as we managed to save it last.

This was my first experience in this sort of situation. Last year they experienced the same thing, but my brother was here. I only heard about it. Getting here, I was assured that the issues had been sorted out but I guess there wasn't much that could be done about it for one compound when the entire estate is ravaged by a disaster.

A lot of money was spent on fixing the things that got bad. Every year people in the riverine parts of my country experience this sort of situation. It has become so normal that we label September through November the "flooding period". It's just expected. In one particular state, school resumption was held back for 2 months because the Government was waiting for the floods to start.

I thought about how much was spent today and then I think about how much people spend every single year when this happens. It's absurd. I had a friend whose family had to move into a hotel for weeks just because they were rendered homeless by the flood of 2012. It was a memorable period.

A lot of money is put into so many projects yet a disaster caused by man-made problems is made into a long vacation as if it has no solution.

Today has been sorted out. But no one predicts the weather properly, what if it happens again tomorrow? We'd have to get through a flood drill all over again from 6 am until 4 pm.

I've had a tiring day.

Thanks for reading!