(ERGO) – Abdinasir Mohamed Hussein and his family are among 250 families in Do’oley, central Somalia’s Galgadud region, who have been displaced by floods caused by heavy rainfall.
Abdinasir has relocated his family four kilometres away from their house.
“We are a poor family who didn’t have much before and now we have been displaced from our house. Life is hard and we’ve now moved to the outskirts of the town. We get one meal a day, we don’t have savings and our belongings were washed away, there is nothing we carried with us from the flood,” he said.
Abdinasir has been taking loans to feed his wife and seven children and has already taken $110 in May. They are sleeping rough under tree shades despite the continuing rain.
“When the floods started and the rainfall continued to fall we decided to move. If we stayed longer even the people would be washed away. So we decided to evacuate the children and elderly people. As we left the water level was rising. We still can’t go back to our house,” said Abdinasir.
He has been back to check on their two-room brick house from afar and seen that it is submerged in water.
Abdinasir is a former pastoralist, who lost his 200 goats and 50 camels to severe droughts in 2017 and 2018. In 2018, he borrowed $700 to open a small cafeteria as an alternative livelihood. It used to bring in $10-12 a day, but has bene washed away as well.
“We are out of work now and there are no job opportunities in this area,” he said.
Also affected by the floods is Ahmed Abdullahi Hassan, with his wife and five children. They are short of food and have to get water from a borehole two kilometres away, where a barrel costs $2.
He says he has $25 left and has been trying not to use it all on water. They collect rain water for domestic use. They are living with relatives who offer them meals but cannot stay there for much longer.
“This place is located on higher ground but we can’t continue to stay here because I was working and we are now worried about our situation,” he said.
Ahmed was also a businessman whose shop was washed away by the floods before he could salvage anything.
“The water swept through the shop from the front and the back, and I can say there is nothing left. Just imagine, I had a good life and used to support other people but we are now dependent on other people,” he said.
Do’oley lies in low land which is prone to flooding. A water catchment in area also overspilled worsening the floods in this area. The continuing rainfall makes it unlikely the floods will recede soon.
The local commissioner, Elmi Ahmed Adan, said it could take up to three months to fully recover from the effects of these floods. He noted that the displaced families were vulnerable to disease as the sewage systems had been disrupted and waste had contaminated the flood water.
“The flood has affected many areas including the market. Everyone has been forced to leave this area, and people have also evacuated from the residential neighborhoods. Two locations near the flooded area are up on higher ground but the rest have been overwhelmed by the floods,” he said.
