So
when I got back to site, my place didn’t look so great (a few photos below). The
wreckage in my site was largely cleaned from the previous week, but the town
was unmistakably changed. I had some new views because a ton of trees were
gone. As for my house, part of my roof had been blown off, but my friend—the
guard for the hospital—put up a half-decent temporary replacement within a day
of when it happened which helped a little with damage control. Part of my wall
toward the roof came apart and fell through my ceiling. So I was open to the
elements, somewhat, as you can see below.
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| Fence definitely gone. All the lemons, avocados and a fruit called pocanel gone too. |
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| Okay dirty. Dirty beats destroyed... |
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| These concrete slabs and the ceiling material pretty much fell where I always sit. Unsettling… |
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| Shouldn't be able to see any of this... |
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| …and the most dangerous thing about cyclones? Flying hypodermic needles. That’s how you get the AIDS. Seriously not sure how that ended up there, though. |
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| These guys fix everything. |
Anyway,
some good news: none of my stuff was actually ruined. All of my clothes were
dirty and wet, but my pictures and nearly all of the papers and books were
fine. Everything basically just needed to be cleaned. I got my place fixed up
within a week.
Back
to the bad news, the real impact of this natural disaster won’t be felt for a
little while. People are repairing their houses and but this may be reimbursed
from regional allotments to the communes. The real problem is that farmland and
cash crops are pretty much all gone. So many banana and litchi trees are gone,
and a ton of coffee too. The people in this commune get most of their money
during the rice harvests in April-June, but apparently the rice fields are
destroyed too. The cyclone just amplified existing problems with money and work
shortage.
As
far as I know, only a few people in my entire commune of ~13,000 people died
during the cyclone. A huge issue, though, is that many of the roads to the main
town were blocked, flooded, or destroyed, and anyone seeking medical attention
probably could not get it. I’m always impressed by the people who come to the
hospital to get their babies vaccinated regularly, etc., because the roads—or
paths—are plenty difficult when completely dry.
Work-related,
I’m interested to see how the three new water systems are holding up. At this stage of the RANO HP project, any
maintenance issues would have to be taken care of by the NGOs because the
private sector has not begun their work in the commune and people have not
started paying for their water. Budget constraints are always imminent, so the
cyclone can’t be good news. What I heard is that one of the dams for the
sources is down, but in general, everything else is fine. I wasn’t able to go
and see anything in the time I was back, however, because the roads out to
these places are still impassable, either flooded or washed out.
Some
counterparts estimated that maybe 2% of the latrines that had been built were
still standing. I’m not surprised by this number because nearly all of the
latrines built are of ravin’ala, or leaves and sticks, and some are random
scrap metal plus the leaves and sticks. It's probably going to be more difficult to
encourage sanitation coverage now that people have experienced a major setback.
My hope is that they would be inspired to build a stronger, more durable
version.
That’s
it for now. I’m definitely okay, and I hope my community will be soon.
