Jamal Ali Abdi has seen flooding in Beledweyne before but never on the scale witnessed earlier this month when the Shabelle River burst its banks, causing devastation to the central Somali town and displacing almost the entire population.<\/p>\n
As water gushed through the streets, Ali\u2019s home was soon surrounded by murky brown flood water.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe water was up to my neck,\u201d said Ali, 36. \u201cOur entire family, including my six children, sought refuge in a relative\u2019s home after our house was immersed. I was barely able to get my children to safety and grab a couple of items as we fled.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe haven\u2019t seen flooding on this scale in years,\u201d he added. \u201cNo one saw this level of devastation coming.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nearly 250 million people have been forced to leave their homes after heavy rainfall in Somalia and the Ethiopian highlands led to flash floods in Beledweyne, the capital of the Hiran region. A week on from the start of the flooding the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) called for urgent funding to scale up assistance, while the Somali Disaster Management Agency distributed aid to displaced families this week.<\/p>\n
Somalia is suffering the effects of the worst drought in four decades, a result of the climate crisis. But OCHA Southern and Eastern Africa warned that the recent precipitation will not counter the devastation caused by years of below-average rainfall.<\/p>\n
In 2019, local people built a defensive wall on the banks of the Shabelle, which has helped prevent flooding during previous heavy rains but could not withstand the force of the water this time.<\/p>\n
Like many members of his community, Ali fled to a relative\u2019s home, where he is sharing a room with two other displaced families.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t have to be here with us to know how difficult it is when you have three families sharing a single room, not knowing when you\u2019ll return home and if the floods left anything behind,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
But the house they escaped to is also surrounded by water, raising fears that they will have to move again. \u201cEveryone is scared that the water will rise,\u201d said Ali, speaking by phone from Beledweyne.<\/p>\n
His fears are widely shared. Hassan Abdi fled with his wife and seven children from their home in the Bundooyinka neighbourhood of Beledweyne on the first day of the flooding. As the water began seeping under his front door, Abdi, 37, decided to take his children to an empty house owned by a friend.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I left with my children, I thought the flooding would be short lived,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ve endured many floods before. After resettling my family, I returned home to take whatever I could but it started getting close to dusk, so I made the decision to spend the night there.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe water level was at my toes initially, but by the time I woke up the following morning, it was knee high. That\u2019s when I knew things would be different this time. I\u2019ve witnessed six floods since moving here in 1997 and this is the worst.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy children are still very young. Sometimes I wonder if they understand that they\u2019ve become displaced and that this empty home might become our permanent home,\u201d added Abdi, who is unemployed and depends on remittances from siblings in the diaspora to support his family. \u201cI don\u2019t believe there\u2019s anything my siblings can do for my family. There are certain things that money can\u2019t fix and a natural disaster is one of them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Source:\u00a0 \u00a0Twitter: @Mohamed_Gabobe<\/em>The Guardian<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jamal Ali Abdi has seen flooding in Beledweyne before but never on the scale witnessed earlier this month when the Shabelle River burst its banks, causing devastation to the central Somali town and displacing almost the entire population. As water gushed through the streets, Ali\u2019s home was soon surrounded by murky brown flood water. \u201cThe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":416934,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-416933","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-local"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=416933"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416933\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":416935,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416933\/revisions\/416935"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/416934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=416933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=416933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=416933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}