Image1: The Kpalwega Community attempts to block a burst dam
Air whistles in the screens as it starts to ‘wind‘, signaling the imminent rain. The power in my office goes out and I watch as the drapes blow into the dark room. Cool air streams in the windows and water starts to pound the tin roof. Today, the storm is more violent than the rains a few days ago, but the trend seems to be easing overall.
The Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) regional office where I work is quiet today. Every agricultural extension officer is on assignment in each corner of the region, collecting data on the flood disaster areas. Farmers have been steadily visiting our office in Tongo, registering themselves, the crops they have lost, and the damages to their homes.
The paths around my house have been impassable for weeks, and dirt roads in the Talensi-Nabdam district are eroding and partially blocked by water. My district is flooded at the southern end, where the White Volta runs through a community called Pwalugu. There, many farmers have lost their homes and fields to the flood water, and the river has risen so high as to reach the treetops, showing no signs of receding. Ousman, the MOFA Extension Agent for Pwalugu Area, reported that hunger has started to affect that community in our last staff meeting.
I remember clearly, at the beginning of August, one of MoFA’s agricultural extension agents told me that the rains were becoming too much. He explained that the buildings, made of clay bricks, are often covered with a thin layer of sand mixed with tar and cement. They have no foundations. When the rains are heavy and continuous—as they have been—the walls become saturated and begin to collapse.
Image 2: Collapsing Kpalwega Church
Last week, one of the brothers in my house told me that when he sleeps, it is never too deep because he fears that the walls around him will not last until morning.
My rough estimate from living and traveling in nearby communities is that more than 85% of traditionally constructed homes in our communities have experienced some cave-ins. Normally the cave-ins are cooking areas and animal housing. The Tikaha house where I am staying lost its pig pen and goat enclosure. The extended family’s compound house has several major walls down, including two cooking hearths and an animal pen, as well as one room. The most noticeable loss is the collapse of small tailor shop run by my Aunt Grace. It is located just by the roadside near the house. In a nearby village, Sakote, where I stayed in August, three families had to take refuge in the local elementary school.
When I anxiously asked my friend Lizzy, a high school student what these families would do, she looked at me calmly: “We will rebuild in the dry season,” without even batting an eyelash.
People just cope.
Image3: Collapsed bridge in Manga Village
She’s right. I have watched people, like Auntie, do just that: cope. Auntie now sets up her tables and her sewing machine under the shade of a baobab tree.
This ability to cope struck me most while I was walking across the village fields in Sakote with George, my host during my stay. The group of 12 men were bent over in the field weeding sorghum with hand hoes to the energetic and skillful music of a handmade guitar accompanied by song. The group stopped as we approached to greet us and walked with us up to the house. We met a pregnant woman pounding spices for the worker’s evening soup surrounded by three young children. Their house was particularly affected, with everyone of its six rooms collapsed. Yet despite it all, we received a warm welcome into their home and were offered flour water as is tradition when strangers arrive.
Because it is still the farming season, construction will have to wait. Unfortunately many of the crops have been spoiled because of the weather conditions and more vulnerable community members are without resources to rebuild or crops to harvest.
The crop failures due to erratic weather conditions has been a profound lesson in the vulnerability of these communities. Earlier in the rainy season, we all prayed for the rains to arrive. Now everyone is praying for them to stop.
The destruction and destitution left from the floods has emphasized to me the importance in reducing farmers vulnerability. I am now looking ahead to the next two months when I will be working with agricultural extension agents at MoFA to promote a business-minded approach to planning the dry season gardening that occurs in irrigated areas at damsites in some communities.
A strong crop in the dry season could really help some of the families who lost their crops this rainy season, and developing the habit of planning their production level each year will help to protect farmers in the future as rains are consistently unpredictable.
