From a distance, the four-month-old trail of the tragedy is still visible—even looming large as the vegetation on its edges shrinks in the freezing elements of July.
No fatal disaster has ever been this closer to Mariam Yusuf, a resident of Three Ways, a shantytown on the slopes of Soche Hill in Blantyre.
The slum, which was planted on a spot that had conventionally been regarded as reserved woodland, was among those heavily battered by mudflows and rockslides triggered by Tropical Cyclone Freddy in March this year.
“I have never seen destruction of that magnitude in my life. The first sounds were like those of a helicopter; then it was like an earthquake,” Yusuf recalls.
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A few yards from her raw-brick house, with two walls still lying on their bases, sit huge rocks dumped there by the mudslides.
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Beneath the rocks lie dozens of houses, which were crushed by the mixture of the massive deluge which the longest-lasting storm on record in Malawi drove down the onetime dense hill.
“There are bodies of people beneath those rocks. Some of us were lucky to have escaped unhurt,” Yusuf says, pointing at the huge solid mineral materials covered in desiccated clay.
A nervous look appearing on her little wrinkly face, she admits that she has not yet mustered the courage to reconstruct her house.
‘Nowhere to shift to’
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So, Yusuf and her two grandchildren sleep in the two bedrooms that survived the storm, apparently because they have nowhere else to shift to.
“I sometimes feel like I should mould bricks and rebuild the fallen walls, but then I am scared of digging up human remains from the ground,” she says.
For six days on end, the cyclone dumped onto the Southern Region rain which should have normally fallen in six months.
“This is one of the darkest hours in the history of our nation,” President Lazarus Chakwera said of the destruction triggered by Freddy, which cycled back a month later to exact harsher pain after initially hitting Malawi, Mozambique and Madagascar in February.
Two weeks after the cyclone had diminished, search and rescue workers called off the exercise after days of combing through the wreckage and mud.
The Department of Disaster Management Affairs (Dodma) said even after deploying excavators and sniffer dogs in the exercise, there was no hope of finding any survivor.
That time, 537 people were still missing while at least 670 had been found dead. Almost four months later, the numbers have not changed.
“Government and well-wishers used every available tool to search for the missing people but to no avail. So from the advice from experts, probably the people were buried in the landslides,” Dodma commissioner Charles Kalemba told Parliament.
Yusuf describes the site of the disaster on whose one edge her home stands as a cemetery.
She still cannot trace some of her neighbours and concludes their bodies are there where the large mass of dirt and rock rumbled and rested.
“It is scary living here. If only I had resources for constructing a house elsewhere, I would immediately do that,” Yusuf says, a fearful glaze registering in her eyes as she thinks about what the next rainy season may invite.
Relocation challenges
During a trip where he visited survivors of Cyclone Freddy in Blantyre—which registered the largest number of affected people—Vice-President Saulos Chilima indicated relocating households from hilly areas could avert and minimise impacts of misadventures perennially hitting some parts of the country.
Chilima said the places, such as Four Ways in the commercial city, should be declared as locations where no one should be residing.
Former presidents Bakili Muluzi and Joyce Banda also called for total relocation of people out of disaster-prone areas.
The duo declared their position during a meeting with Blantyre district and city council officials and others on post-Freddy recovery.
“People must be moved from such dangerous places, whether it means using force. We cannot continue to lose people during disasters as was the case during Cyclone Freddy,” Muluzi said.
During the engagement, Blantyre City Council Chief Executive Officer Denis Chinseu said the council was engaging the Lands Ministry and Malawi Housing Corporation to identify land where to relocate the survivors to.
Yusuf and several other survivors remain stuck in what is left of their homes, which somehow escaped the impacts of Cyclone Freddy by a whisker.
“Those who can manage to build on their own have moved to safer locations. Those of us who cannot manage are waiting for government as per its promise,” she says.
Such sentiments are shared by Muona Maliko, another resident of Three Ways, who says she will not hesitate to leave the area if she is given a new home.
Maliko recollects that government authorities promised to allocate the survivors plots in at least three safer locations in Blantyre.
“Now it appears they have forgotten everything. Maybe they are waiting for another disaster to hit us again,” she says long-sufferingly.
Out of disaster zone
During our visit to Three Ways, we found some houses, which were partly damaged by the mudslides, abandoned as their occupants had reportedly moved elsewhere.
A local leader for the area, Jones Msongwe, said at least 100 families had chosen never to return to “the haunted neighbourhood”.
Msongwe claimed that months after the disaster, recorded as the most energetic to lash the southern hemisphere, human bones continue being recovered from the ruins.
“We should not be staying here. Everyone is willing to move out, but we have nowhere to move out to,” he narrates.
While in some districts, which were also heavily hit by the impacts of Freddy, well-wishers are rebuilding houses for survivors, Blantyre residents feel abandoned.
“No one can be comfortable staying in a place which has human bodies below it,” Patrick Jumbe, whose house was not completely razed down by the rockslides, says.
He hopes the promise of moving families from disaster-prone areas to safer ones will be fulfilled before the next rainy season, which is just four months away.
Jumbe admits that residents of the hillside area contributed to the tragedy by clearing the forest on it and putting up houses in spots not declared residential.
He insists, like Msongwe, that those who are still living in areas likely to be hit by flash floods again have no means of settling elsewhere.
Languid recovery process
In an interview last week, Kalemba, indicated that the department is still mobilising resources with which to continue supporting its post-recovery efforts.
“The first part was response, where we needed K70 billion for reaching out to survivors in camps during the three months after the cyclone,” he said.
The Dodma boss added that with support from partners, the department has also assisted some households to rebuild houses in safer locations, away from disaster-prone ones.
On the other hand, Kalemba states that in Blantyre, most affected individuals were renting houses and that they moved to rent elsewhere.
“Of course, there are some households in Machinga, Nsanje, Zomba and Mulanje districts that are still in camps and need to be relocated elsewhere.
“These people cannot return to their original homes to rebuild there because that would be risking their lives,” he said.
However, in Blantyre’s Three Ways and another affected stretch on the other side of the hill, where flash floods also killed dozens of people, some survivors remain stuck in the risky spots.
Yusuf Sumani is one of those who joined the search and rescue team, spearheaded by Malawi Defence Force soldiers, and says the affected areas should not be occupied again.
He still sums up images of blood and oily substances bubbling through small water ditches beneath which human bodies were dug out.
“It is only necessary that we move to other areas. Even if this place will not be hit by another disaster, the truth is that it is a graveyard, a haunted zone,” Suman says.
Disaster preparedness in perspective
Linked to climate change, Cyclone Freddy has significantly put to test Malawi’s preparedness for disasters.
Environmental activist Julius Ng’oma wonders why authorities have not taken advantage of “numerous warnings” on potential climate change-induced disasters to mitigate their impacts.
“Climate change is real and disasters induced by the phenomenon will continue occurring. Preparedness is crucial,” Ng’oma says.
Squeezed by the extensive response that is still required after the cyclone, President Chakwera appealed to rich nations—who are also the largest emitters of greenhouse gases—to aid Malawi in its recovery initiative.
He admitted his country does not have the capacity to recover from the effects of the storm without international help.
“Climate change is real and what we are seeing is devastation,” the Malawi leader said.
Experts point out that as climate change causes warmer oceans, heat energy from the water’s surface is fuelling stronger storms.
They argue that the long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns are intensifying rainfall and wind speed and increasing the frequency of “very intense” storms, among others.
In its report released days after Cyclone Freddy had diminished, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is made up of the world’s leading climate scientists, warned that failure to fast-track climate efforts will plunge the world to the brink of irrevocable damage.
The scientists found that the world is likely to surpass its most ambitious climate target, that of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures by early 2030s.
“We are not doing enough and the poor and vulnerable are bearing the brunt of our collective failure to act,” Madeleine Diouf Sarr, Senegal’s top climate official and chair for a group of least-developed countries that negotiate together at the United Nations, said.
The general talk now could be about what should happen for the future, but for survivors of Tropical Cyclone Freddy, the loss and damage is a present concern.
For instance, while authorities in Malawi will wait for up to seven years to declare dead the 537 people missing in the wake of the storm, their relatives already conducted funeral rites in memory of their loved ones.
After emergency workers and rescuers folded up their activities and declared that was the farthest they could go, those who lost family members chose early closures.
