‘There was nothing we could do,’ says South African woman who watched floodwaters engulf her home

For a moment, Zukiswa Mbuku and her husband had breakfast and took an ordinary Tuesday. The next one, they fled with anything other than the clothes on their backs while the raw waters that unleash swallowed their house.

The elderly couple lives near a river in Mthatha, a South African city in the coastal province in the east of the Cap, which is currently in a state of national disaster while people try to recover from the deadly floods last week.

Mbuku says that she and her husband had just finished eating when a neighbor ran and warned them to run because the river water quickly approached houses. From the rear window, they could already see their garden flooding.

“Then we came out through the front door. When we looked at the road, the water was going to arrive,” said Mbuku In this case Nile Kӧksal host.

The water of the river seemed almost galloping towards them, she said, but without noise, like a silent, but terrifying horse. In a few minutes, he had surrounded their house to the windows.

“We had to rush without taking anything because everything happened so quickly,” she said. “We couldn’t do anything.”

“Unprecedented, catastrophic and unimaginable”

An extreme meteorological front brought heavy rains, strong winds and snow to one of the poorest provinces in South Africa last week, causing floods that left 92 dead and roads, houses, schools and other damaged infrastructures. Mthatha was the hardest success.

At least two schoolchildren who have been swept away on a bus are part of the unaccompanied number of missing people according to local media reports, while thousands of people have since been moved.

The authorities called on residents to report disappeared people so that the rescuers can better understand how many people they were still looking for.

“Since June 9, this province has been hit hard by unprecedented, catastrophic and unimaginable disasters,” said Zolile Williams on Thursday, a member of the provincial legislature, during a commemorative service in Mthatha for the victims.

“Since that day, Cap Oriental has not been the same.”

Struggle to rebuild what has been lost

Life has certainly not been the same for Mbuku.

She and her husband have since found refuge in a bed and local breakfast, she said, just five houses from their flooded house.

“We are at the river curve. So all the houses that are on the curve before the river stands up, they were affected,” she said. “The other houses are on the upper side. The water has never reached them.”

When flood water fell, the couple returned home to assess the damage.

“When my husband opened the front door, the water rushed like anything. It was energetic,” she said. “The refrigerator floated, chairs floated, sofas floated.”

Some of her furniture, she said, had been separated and fled in the house.

While the house is still standing, it is still too wet and damaged water to return, especially with the asthma of Mbuku.

“We are 70 years old. It’s quite traumatic,” she said. “How do you get together and restore what you have collected all these years? What are you doing?”

The community gathers

The declaration of a national catastrophe allows the government to release the funding for rescue and rehabilitation. But Mbuku says that she did not get many people in terms of help from government representatives. A local advisor called them, she said, and “promised that they would do something because of our age”.

“We thought they would provide us with accommodation, but they did not do it,” she said. Instead, she said, her family helped find them a place to stay.

But she says that her community – parents, neighbors and members of her church – intensified to offer the support they can.

“We help each other,” she said.