Muddy water swept away everything, sowing death and desolation in Nyamukubi, one of the villages devastated Thursday by the floods that killed at least 200 people in South Kivu, in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
“It looks like the end of the world. I’m looking for my parents and my children,” laments Gentille Ndagijimana, with tears in her eyes.
At 27, Gentille and her family are from Masisi, in the neighboring province of North Kivu. They fled fighting between the Congolese army and M23 rebels last January and found refuge here.
She lost her two children, her two sisters and her parents. Her injured husband is in hospital. “I no longer have a family and I don’t have a field. Now I have to find a place to sleep…”, continues the young woman sadly.
At the foot of the green hills of Kalehe territory, on the western shore of Lake Kivu bordering Rwanda, a desert landscape of mud and stones has taken possession of an entire neighborhood. There were dwelling houses, a market, two schools, a health center, a multipurpose room, a warehouse. Nothing remains.
On Thursday evening, under the effect of heavy rain, the Nyamukubi and Chishova rivers overflowed and washed away everything in their path.
“I am a biker. I had come home from work, I left my motorcycle at home and I went out to see friends. When I returned, my house, my motorcycle and my family members had disappeared”, testifies him also with AFP Roger Bahavu, father of seven children.
All are dead, their mother too, and their grandmother. “Of eleven people in the family, we only remain two,” sadly says the father of the family, who hopes to find the bodies of his family.
“There are a lot of bodies, we are overwhelmed,” said Isaac Habamungu, a local Red Cross agent.
The administrator of the Kalehe territory estimated on Saturday at 203 the number of bodies found. In Nyamukubi alone, a “sub-village” of the locality of Bushushu, 120 remains had already been buried.
“We think a lot of bodies have washed up in the lake… We wonder how we’re going to get out of this,” adds Isaac. “We don’t have body bags, there’s no funding for what we do,” he says.
The teams, he continues, dig in search of the corpses “with their hands and a few shovels”. They wrap the bodies in blankets or sheets, before burying them in mass graves.
On the shore of the lake float pieces of wood, sheet metal, furniture and other materials carried by the raging rivers. On sunken houses, young people try to salvage what can still be salvaged: sheet metal, metal structures, planks…
The Red Cross and the administration continue to register the families who have lost theirs, as well as the victims.
The village chief, Marcel Mubona, expects more deaths than those already counted. It will “get worse”, he says, when he has just learned of the death of a young man who had been hospitalized.
Terminus for all the sick and injured, the only operational health establishment in the area is a private institution, the “hospital for the promotion of mother and child health” which, also overwhelmed, has to deal with the lack of medicines, nursing staff and beds.
“We are waiting for the government’s reaction, to help us send” the most serious cases to larger hospitals, and to “provide us with drugs to take care of the others”, asks Dr. Bauma Ngola, medical director of the hospital. ‘hospital.
Sitting on her bed, desperate, her face bruised, suffering from serious injuries to her foot, a young woman thinks she is “dying”.
“My wounds and my body are swelling, they say my leg needs to be cut off,” she says. Next to her, her 10-year-old son, whose injuries are causing him more and more pain, is also waiting to be taken care of.
07/05/2023 17:56:10 – Mosquito (RD Congo) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
