The scary night of 13 August

Munny Murmu

 

Dhanpalthan, Morang 30 August 2017 – A woman in her early nineties approaches to a public gathering. She carries a stool (a piece of furniture to sit on) and a staff. At the beginning, it was thought that she carried a stool to sit on, and a staff to support her. But as she proceeded towards the gathering, she leaned on the stool and supported herself by the staff.  

Munny Murmu, a 90-year-old woman in fragile health, had walked all the way from her house to the gathering. She is hard of hearing and cannot speak Nepali, the lingua franca. So we had to seek support of a local person who could speak her language and interpret us.

Because of her age and lack of balanced diet during her adulthood, she stoops while walking. On top of the weak health, she broke her right leg some years ago and she has been facing difficulty in moving around since then. Nowadays she uses the stool and the stick to support her while walking.

The flood not only devastated the life and livelihood of the people, but also took almost all the affected people by surprise. None of the people we interacted with had the faintest idea about the vulnerability of their habitat to flood. For Munny the 13 August flood was completely an untoward incident. She never ever imagined that her village would be flooded.

“I am extremely sad. The flood was quite an unthought-of event. I have seen many floods in my life, but not like this one. The destruction of houses, crops and other infrastructure and the loss of cattle has saddened me,” said the senior citizen.

Munny was at her house during the flood. She thought that her house was safe as she had never seen such flood in her life and her settlement was never flooded before. She was also panicked by the news of the massive flood as she cannot run away. And the flood came in the dead of the night.

“The night was very scary. I am old and fragile. I just wondered who will rescue me. I simply remembered my 2 sons, 5 daughters and about 20 grandchildren,” she related.

Munny, an aged single woman who lost her husband 25 years ago, was informed about the flood by her neighbours. Her entire family members were at home during the flood. Since she had a permanent house made of reinforce, concrete and cement built on raised land, she and her family did not have to run away at midnight.

Although she is an unschooled village woman, she knows about disaster risk reduction or in other words, she knows how her community can be protected against floods. “Embankment along the Lohondra River can save us from such floods in the future,” she suggested. She repeated that she was moved by the death of people, loss of food grains, clothes and cattle, poultry and fish in her farm and her vicinity.  

Story by Ram Sharan Sedhai, LWF Nepal and photograph by Prajjwal Maharjan.