After the mudslide
There has been a mudslide in the eastern Uganda. This made thousands of people homeless and several people are still missing. Ane, a long-term volunteer for the Danish Red Cross Youth, is telling about life in the camp.
By Ane Norup, April 2010.
Two weeks after a large mudslide had forced thousands of people to flee and killed an unknown number of people, I arrived to the Buluckeke IDP Camp, Mbale Region in the eastern part of Uganda. 99 bodies had been dug out from the mud, but several hundred people are still missing.
About 3,500 of the people who fled are living in this Red Cross Camp – 1,000 of them are children under the age of 5, 85 are pregnant women and 500 are young people in general. Each day, the population of the camp is growing due to people of all ages – including newborn babies – arrive from different other cities affected by the mudslide.
Feels a bit like Roskilde Festival
The camp area reminds me of a festival camp: muddy like a rainy year at Roskilde Festival but not at all as festive! And unfortunately these people have to stay here for longer than a week – and if their tent is destroyed, they cannot just leave it and go home – this IS their home while they are kept in suspense of what is next.
54 tents have been set up and volunteers from the Uganda Red Cross Society have started to put up around 20 family tents. When this is done, some of the people in the camp will be relocated – and this will make room for the newly arrived.
Besides the tents, different facilities have been set up: toilets (or holes in the ground and plastic walls), baths (small rooms with plastic walls) and a health clinic, where the Uganda Red Cross Society offers first aid to everyone and examinations to pregnant women and others.
Welcome to a world out of order
During the first three weeks, nine children were born in tents in the Buluckeke IDP Camp. The women stay in the tents in stead of going to the health clinics. The local midwife explains that the women prefer to suffer or even die in their tents – just like their families and friends did during the mudslide – instead of going to the clinic.
I try to explain to the pregnant women at the clinic that they need to look after each other and come to the clinic if they are in pain. And when they have given birth, they need to inform the Red Cross Society so they can get a “baby-kit”. The women clap their hands as a thank you. While I leave the clinic in mud and rain, I decide to follow up on the highly needed psychosocial effort in the camp.
Education is the way forward, but how?
The Buluckeke IDP Camp has its own primary school, which is driven by the Save the Children Fund. Now, three weeks after the mudslide, 2,000 young children go to school but only 400 of them live in the camp.
The other students come from the surrounding villages and from villages threatened by the mudslide. These children come from poor conditions and have heard that the books are free at this school.
The older pupils in the camp participate in classes in the surrounding schools, as there is not capacity for having a secondary school in the camp. Several of these pupils are worried about the future. One of them, a young girl, lost her father due to AIDS some years ago. Her uncle paid her school fees because her mother could not effort it, but now the uncle died in the mudslide. How is she going to continue getting an education?
Another girl is an orphan after the mudslide and she is now living with her grand parents in the camp. But they do not have enough money to provide for her. What is she going to do now…
