Rebuilding Lives

City Press | 3 Oct 2010

By Kristin Palitza

“I remember it as if it was yesterday. I was busy cooking when I heard people screaming. I ran outside to find out what’s going on. The earth shook. When I turned back, I saw one side of my house collapse,” Faida Mwenelupembe recalls the first of two major earthquakes that hit the north of Malawi in December 2009.

Reaching 5.4 and 6.2 on the Richter scale, the quakes caused 24,000 houses in Karonga district, located along the Great Rift Valley near Malawi’s border with Tanzania, to come crashing down. More than nine months later, the buildings still stand in ruins, with most victims living in tents or rickety, makeshift shelters.

“We feel unsafe. We are afraid of snakes. When the rains start, there will be no protection,” worries Mwenelupembe, who lives with her husband and grandchild in a temporary structure they built from reeds.

Despite the fact that she received a grant from the Malawi Red Cross to fix up her house, recovery efforts have been slow, mainly because the national Department of Disaster Management’s structural assessment report and geological survey took more than four months to be published. Without them, no reconstruction was allowed to begin.

“We didn’t have enough vehicles, so mobility was a problem. We also didn’t have laptops or even enough desktop computers, so we had to gather and evaluate the information manually,” Steve Chima, director of administration at the Malawi Local Authority in Karonga, explains why it took so long to gather data.

In the end, government stipulated that construction could not start before July, confirms Malawi Red Cross district recovery project officer Felix Mkandawire.

But Mwenelupembe and the other earthquake victims cannot afford such delays. All building needs to be finished before the beginning of the rainy season in November, when everything will come to a standstill for several months.

The reports, when finally published, revealed worrisome facts: more than 10,000 of the 24,000 affected households are in critical need of assistance. To help those families rebuild their homes will require a substantial budget – and it quickly became clear that the Malawian government would rely on the support of donor agencies.

“As a government, we can’t manage alone,” says Chima, noting that the Department of Disaster Management is planning to release R1.03 million for reconstruction, but this will only be enough for 200 houses. “It’s a drop in the ocean,” he admits.

Throughout the year, several international aid agencies have mobilised funds to assist. World Bank, for example, has started to rebuilt schools and teachers’ homes, while a few religious organisations have given money to repair churches and the Red Cross has made available funds to built 150 houses and repair another 500.

But despite all these efforts, only about a tenth of those in dire need will be helped. “There is a huge gap between the number of those who are being helped and those who need help,” notes Mkandawire. He says the Red Cross’ initial target was to rebuilt 6,000 homes, but there were simply not enough funds to do so.

As a result, only the ultra-poor of the 10,000 most needy will receive financial assistance, including female-headed and child-headed households, the disabled, chronically ill, the elderly and those who were physically injured by the earthquakes.

One of the beneficiaries is Edicas Nachinga, a woman who says she is “too old to know my age” and unable to walk. She lives together with her daughter and eleven children in remote Mwakhwama village without any form of income, living off the vegetables they manage to plant and a few chicken. When the first earthquake hit, their house, a one-roomed mud building, completely collapsed.

With the assistance of the Red Cross, their new house, which is being built with fired bricks and cement, is in mid-construction. Nachinga desperately hopes it will be finished before the start of the first rains.

Apart from delays on government’s side, rural customs have further slowed down the rebuilding process – after a funeral, villagers are not allowed to work for up to four weeks. “Everything comes to a standstill when there is a death. It’s been a huge challenge,” notes Mkandawire. “We have been speaking to the village headmen to reduce the time of mourning to less than a week. Otherwise we’ll never get anything done.”

Government and aid agencies not only want to help residents repair and rebuilt their homes. They also want communities to construct safer structures in case more earthquakes hit the region. On 2 September, the national Department of Housing and Urban Development published a technical manual that gives advise on site selection, design, construction and building methods.

But without the necessary funds, most earthquake victims will not be able to implement the guidelines because they cannot afford to buy fired clay bricks, nor do they have the money to purchase enough bricks to reinforce walls and lay proper foundations.

“We are concerned that most people will rebuild according to traditional methods. The next earthquake will destroy their houses again,” says Wiseman Kayira, sponsorship coordinator at World Vision, another donor agency assisting with recovery efforts.

He added: “Guidelines are of little use without a far-reaching education campaign and without financial support. NGOs need to put pressure on government to make sure it delivers.”