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Horn Relief Tsunami Response: Somalia's coastal communities rebuild |
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Thursday, 15 September 2005 |
Horn Relief Somalia's Tsunami Response Livelihood Recovery Project began this July in the Bender Beyla District of northeastern Somalia, with nine tsunami-affected coastal villages initiating cash-for-work development projects to build and repair roads that will decrease economic and social isolation of coastal villages. Coastal communities here have survived government failure, drought, forced migration, and the piracy of fishing catch. The tsunami disaster compounded the impact of drought and administrative neglect, causing not only infrastructural damage, but crippling the fishing trade that has sustained this string of coastal villages for generations, writes Horn Relief, 15 Sep 2005 in Relief Web at http://www.reliefweb.int/
Forwarded by Budhi Mulyawan 150905.
The tsunami wave that traveled across the Indian Ocean from Indonesia on the 26th of December reached at least ten meters in height at its breaking point on the Somali coast, slapping onto the Bender Beyla beachfront like an enormous wall of glass. The wave decimated about forty houses, cracked the seaside mosque in half, and destroyed fishing boats and equipment. Two fishermen in boats on the sea were drowned. The current washed others ashore against jagged rocks, houses, and sand dunes.
"The wave pushed Jama against a stone," says Halima, a mother of eight who lost her home to the disaster, referring to her seven-year-old son. "His eyes and nose have bad problems now and it left this scar."
As the tsunami's current receded, the Beyla market stalls and stores were spread across the beach, parked boats were spun around and snapped in half. An odd mix of heavy logs and coconuts, which do not exist anywhere on the Somali northeast coasts, were left in the sand mixed with stones, pieces of boats, and dead fish.
"This man," a fisherman displaced from Mogadishu says, pointing to a smashed stone house. "Lost his house and now lives here with these people in the camp."
The owner, Jamaali, known to his friends as "October", stands with one hand on the crumbling stone wall of his destroyed house, and the other on his temporary stick and plastic home, which stands among twenty others also displaced by the damage. A crowd of men and sons squat in the sand between the houses, weaving and working out the kinks of a wide fishing net. Women huddle over small steel cookers, their children walking around in swarms or brushing their teeth pensively with rumay sticks.
Horn Relief is a Somali-led international NGO that works in northeastern Somalia. The Tsunami Response Project is a developmental relief intervention that provides a daily wage that coastal residents can use to rebuild homes, purchase fishing equipment, and invest in village assets. The wage is provided to participants in exchange for their work on refurbishing the road from Bender Beyla to the inland trading centers to the West, with the long-term aim of reducing vulnerability to shocks such as the tsunami by improving infrastructure that is essential to local market stability. Some of the workers also contribute to the repair of a major gully that cuts through the center of town, widened by the tsunami wave so that it now threatens to collapse under the homes that sit at its edge.
Before the Indian Ocean tsunami struck land seven months ago, small fishing communities on Somalia's northeast coast had already suffered major economic shocks. Having been unsupported since the country's government collapsed in 1991, with much of the population then forcibly redistributed by civil war, pastoral communities and interlinked coastal villages were unprepared for a prolonged drought that lasted from 2001 to 2004. Desperate pastoralists who lost family members or herds to hunger-related disease migrated to coastal villages looking for jobs, cash loans, or aid.
For Bender Beyla, a cliff-side village of stone and mortar houses overlooking a long thin beachfront, the sudden growth in population stretched already thin resources. There were no tarmac roads for hundreds of kilometers, only a winding gravel path for trucks to make the ten-hour drive to the nearest major shipping port of Bosaso.
The crews of about one hundred small boats stored on the beach sustained the community's economy with a catch of lobster, tuna, and sometimes shark. A large sand gully had already formed through the southern neighborhood, threatening to crumble out from under ten houses and a cemetery over time. Although two small springs flow nearby, most villagers depended on water trucked in from a more distant source at about two dollars a barrel.
Horn Relief identified participants for the project by consulting with village councils and women's groups, using an information gathering technique to identify levels of household asset depletion such as property loss, livestock holdings, family size, degree of debt, and financial support from overseas. Project facilitators have encouraged women's participation at work sites, which reached as high as 41% among workers participating in the repair of the town's gully.
The project, which will provide three months employment to the families until they can recover their assets for the current fishing season, will result in the re-surfacing of 50 kilometers of road, stabilizing mountainside vehicle descents, and preventing gully erosion. With the completion of Horn Relief's Tsunami Response Livelihood Recovery Project, Bender Beyla.
District residents like Halima, Jama, Dayir, and October will have a better chance at rebuilding their houses and protecting themselves from future shocks to their traditional way of life.
For more about Horn Relief, see www.hornrelief.org or contact: Lesley Bourns, Program Coordinator,
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