Where Soldiers Fear to Tread A Relief Worker's Tale of Survival

1. The Crisis One villager reported the building simply collapsed without warning. The woman and her three children and the two old people on the tin roof vanished under the fast-moving brown floodwaters and were swept away. Marerey was one of the villages on the banks of the southern stretch of the Webbi Jubba. It was disappearing fast, ripped apart by the rising river that had broken its banks and was sweeping away everything in its path. Its people were a strong lot, used to hardship. They had weathered searing droughts and previous floods, the pestilence of locusts and mysterious diseases. They were more fortunate than others. One time not so long ago, there had been a sugar factory on the other side of the airstrip, where many worked, and so the villagers could afford tin roofs instead of thatch, could afford to build their homes of mud bricks instead of wattle. There had even been a school. But the fighting had come and families fought families and the area had been divvied up by the warlords and their clans. The sugar factory had been destroyed in one of the many seesaw battles for turf and was now no more than a skeletal ruin. There had been things to salvage, however, and the youths who remained in the village, who had not left to join the fighting, had scavenged wood and cement blocks, slabs of Styrofoam, wire and rope, furniture and vessels, poles and plastic. Marerey was in the breadbasket of Somalia, a land of cultivated fields and grazing plains, veined with a complex network of irrigation canals and roads; those who had not worked at the factory had raised cattle and goats, sugarcane, bananas, maize, and sorghum. Although they lived on the river, they were not fisher- men and they seldom ate fish. They were pastoralists. The Jubba, one of Somalia's only two perennial streams, existed in their eyes mainly to provide the water for the fields and to carry away the effluence. The muddy river originating in Ethiopia to the north was not very polluted; there had been few pesticides in use and little industry and it was still pretty clean by the time it got this far, tainted only by the raw sewage from the communities on the river. The men usually quit their homes around dawn and took their places in a row, lifted their sarongs or dropped their trousers, squatted over the river, and performed their ablutions. The women performed theirs on the bend downriver where the Jubba took a turn. The rains that were causing the floods had started suddenly. They say that one day, one month, it was normally dry and plans were made for the harvest. Then the next day the black clouds rolled in off the ocean to the east, merging with storms that drifted down from the north, and the skies opened up. And still it rained. There were not many left in Marerey. Most of the residents had fled earlier to the narrow earthen dike about a half mile downriver, taking what little they could; the dike was bigger then and it had looked solid and safe and indestructible. They were, however, only a little safer there than had they taken refuge on the roofs of their homes, for the fast-moving river was steadily eating away at the dike; sections of earth peeled away, broke off, and tumbled into the flood. Those who decided to stay in Marerey huddled together for warmth on top of their roofs under the pelting rains that never seemed to end. Some had tucked themselves under plastic sheeting; others had only cotton cloth as cover, and that only deadened the sting from the deluge. The waters were rising steadily, two to three inches an hour. The night before, the river had climbed over the embankment and crept through the village, slowly, like a serpent searching, covering, consuming everything in its path. By daybreak, the roads, the town center, and finally the floors of the homes had disappeared under the flood. Those who took to their roofs watched the water below reach ever higherBurnett, John S. is the author of 'Where Soldiers Fear to Tread A Relief Worker's Tale of Survival', published 2006 under ISBN 9780553382600 and ISBN 0553382608.