Flood

51

March 2025

From Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:

The webcam focused on the round face of little John Ojola. He was six years old, but he looked much younger, three perhaps, his growth stunted by lack of food, his limbs like twigs, his belly swollen under a row of ribs. He lay cradled in the arms of a Christian Aid worker who had no food to give him, here in this refugee camp in Teso, Uganda. John’s huge, luminous eyes, unblinking despite the flies that sipped at his tears, seemed to stare through the camera at the viewer.

John was a sight you could have witnessed any time since the 1960s. His brief life was a cliche of pain. Few visitors to this voluntary-agency website lingered for more than a few seconds.

But now John was distracted; his head tipped sideways against the arm of the aid worker. She too was looking away, at something much more remarkable than another hungry child.

This camp had been here for several years-but this year was different. This year there was flooding across a swathe of Africa, from the Sahel to the Horn, from Senegal, Mauritania, Mali and Burkina Faso in the west, to Kenya, Sudan and Ethiopia in the east, some of the continent’s poorest countries. There was already little food to spare, and now the floods were making it impossible for the local subsistence farmers to plant for this year’s harvest, the cassava, millet and groundnuts. The flooded roads hindered any attempts at relief. And as the rising water contaminated springs and wells, the numbers of cases of diarrhea and malaria were increasing fast.

John had no memory of the last great flooding episode in this part of Africa, back in 2007, caused by a La Nina event in the Pacific. In 2007 the waters had eventually subsided. These new floodwaters were still rising.

And John stared at the family who had just walked into the camp. They were dressed smartly, the two children in robust AxysCorp dungarees, the woman in a loose dress, though they were all dusty from their long trek. The man actually wore a business suit, so rapid had the family’s flight been from the drowning city of Kitgum.

They found an empty space in the dirt and sat down. The woman inspected her bleeding feet, and tended to her children.

The man in the suit looked up at the aid workers. He held out his cupped hands. “ S’il vous plait? Please?”